Ayuuuup. Libgen, calibre, and Apple Books for me these days.
I’ve bought around 1000 kindle books over the years, but that shit ended this year when I found out about this stuff. Spent a week stripping the drm from all my purchases (the ones Amazon didn’t burn up in the memory hole, anyway; bout a dozen of the books I paid for are no longer available for download), adding them to calibre, and backing the data up.
Now I use the apple books app on my phone to read them. It’s not as convenient, but fuck Amazon.
Ebooks are so fucking annoying to use with licensed books, like anyone who has a mom that got an ebook reader knows what a pain it is to set it up with a library and teach her how to use it, then you have device restrictions etc.
Just another example of media where pirating is so easy and so much better. You download an incredibly small single file, copy to the device, and you have the book, easy. If I can get it from the library and pay for that service with my taxes, if I “check out” the book and then pirate it, there’s no ethical issues with pirating it.
Personally though I prefer either audiobooks or hard copies, I just find the ebook readers too annoying to use and manage. I’d honestly rather buy a book then donate or lend it to someone when I’m done with it. In high school through college I had a job where I drove for about 20 hours every week and I basically went through all the classics in audiobook form and then got in to popular history and philosophy then into more academic territory, was surprising what I was able to get in audiobook format and just became accustomed to it.
Pirating and Librera or e-reader nevernconnected to internet.
Thankfully, the only ebooks I have only gotten so far are classics from Gutenberg website.
Keep your ebook readers dumb and use them offline. Load them up with books and read them.