How I Read Books

After years of experimentation, this is what works for me.

Sources:

• Project Gutenberg
•  Authors' websites
•  Small publishers (like bookviewcafe.com)
• Google Books
•  Kobo Books

I buy non-DRM books, preferably in EPUB, but most other formats are one conversion away from EPUB.

Storage:

Books get stored on my main computer, in a directory structure like this:

books/AUTHOR/[SERIES]/TITLE

Exceptions:

• Nonfiction is a relatively small part of my reading and doesn't repeat authors so many times, so one author is "Nonfiction" and has all those books under it
• For certain media properties, the structure is books/Media/MEDIA/SERIES/TITLE - for values of MEDIA including Who, StarTrek, StarWars...
• Comics, Romance and RPGs get their own toplevel categories as well.

Main computer software:

I use Calibre in command-line mode for book conversion. That's it.

Android  software:

These are acceptable ebook readers, usable in their free versions:

• FBReader (good in the base version, I paid for the Pro version.)
• Cool Reader
• AIReader
• PocketBook

All of these will let you set things up the way I want them:

• white text on black background
• TeX Gyre Pagella at about 12pts  (any sufficiently good clone of Palatino is acceptable)
• unjustified paragraphs, no margins, linespacing at 120% of the font height, paragraph spacing at 180% of the font height.
• decent hyphenation
• nothing on screen except the text and possibly one status line indicating position
• no page flipping animation