Probably controversial on my next few words but use your phone as an ereader.
Go through a couple of apps for ebooks (FDroid as a few) until you find the app that most suits your needs.
Amazon is not your friend, so try to explore other venues; Smashwords has a pretty interesting catalog. Project Guttenberg has a good number of older texts and public domain books, all for free.
I am sure other options exist, especially if willing to navigate the high seas.
Phones don’t provide the same experience as an e-reader with e-ink. The best option, IMO, is to get an e-reader that allows sideloading and works without Internet connection, so you can read books about the high seas.
I have an e-reader as well as a phone, tablet, and paper books and honestly I still prefer my phone over anything else. With my phone it’s easier to look up words/concepts I don’t know if I want more than a simple definition of the word. Sometimes I will use the e-reader with my phone next to me for when I want to look something up. These days I would say paper books are my least favorite medium though. Big, bulky, and it’s more work to read them in the dark.
If possible, get your books in epub format, get an eInk Android tablet for less than £100 and enjoy.
Most of the books I have on my reader are not available in epub or formats like it, rather as pdf/djvu scans. So I’d add it might be absolutely worth it to pay more for a big screen.
Also the device never ever connects to the internet. Gives you more freedom.
You can easily convert pdf files to epub then do a little light editing to make sure you don’t have weird artifacts like page numbers the book name or author name. I can process a pdf to epub in 20 minutes at most (most are a minute it two) for average novel length, which I understand is a big ask for lots of folks but it’s worth it to me to have the file in a format that I can keep and use on pretty much anything.
“Do a light editing” you mean read through a huge book? I have downloaded automatically-converted versions like this and they’re unreadable at times. Also would that work well on complex math formulas?
Edit: might try doing so to upload for others, but looking through the whole book must be long, tedious work, definitely not something I’d do for every book.
”Do a light editing “ You mean read through a huge book?
No, I mean use your eyes to see if there are any obvious breaks in the text, most of the time they’re repeated and follow a pattern that is easily searched and every instance replaced with a button press.
Yes, but far from all mistakes are like this. You’d need to manually scan through a potentially long book. Fine if you do it occasionally for some books to contribute to Libgen, but you’d go insane if you try to do it to your whole library for personal use.
Edit: I meant not repeated and more or less obvious mistakes like these, rather those like “one term got mistaken for another real word”, which you won’t catch automatically.
I’ve been doing it for years to my personal books I download that I can’t find in ePub, I have no issues with my sanity. I also usually do this before I read the book, and double check my editing as I read it. 98% of the time I caught all the errors that were not present in the original text (it copies typos perfectly) .
Cool, I just don’t have patience to scan through a 1000-page book prior to reading) Do you upload these for others to use? And again - what software?
