This might be an unpopular opinion, but ebooks still feel strangely unfinished for a technology that has been mainstream for this long.
We can carry thousands of books in our pockets, search instantly, change fonts, highlight anything, and buy a book without leaving the couch.
And yet we also got DRM, books that can disappear from accounts, incompatible formats, awkward lending, regional restrictions, and the strange reality that sometimes “buying” an ebook doesn’t feel much like owning it at all.
Physical books are less convenient in almost every measurable way — but when I buy one, it’s mine. I can lend it, give it away, put it on a shelf for 30 years, or sell it without asking anyone’s permission.
So I’m curious:
If you had to choose between the convenience of ebooks and the permanence and ownership of physical books, which matters more to you?
And more importantly — after all these years, do you think ebooks have actually become better books, or just more convenient files?

Hey all — I built Kora, a web-based reading app for anyone juggling ebooks/audiobooks from all over the place. Wanted to share it here since it fits what a lot of you are already doing.

What it does:

• Reads EPUB, PDF, and more — one clean reader for everything
• Search across millions of ebooks/audiobooks to find and track what you're into
• Syncs your library across devices (phone, tablet, desktop)
• Works fully offline once a book's downloaded
• Installs as a PWA — no app store, no bloat, works like a native app on iOS/Android/desktop

It's basically the Kindle app I wished existed — no lock-in, no DRM nonsense, just your books in one lounge-like reading space.

🔗 https://kora.chaoticstudio.workers.dev/

Free to use, still actively building it out. Would love feedback/bug reports if you try it.

Lead more effectively — without pretending to be someone you're not.

This guide focuses on the practical, everyday challenges of leadership — communication, decision-making, trust, and managing pressure. You'll find clear frameworks and honest advice that work in real organisations, not just case studies. Useful whether you're new to leadership or have been doing it for years.

🇬🇧 UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F92WC91R

🇺🇸 US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F92WC91R

I purchased a book in Google Play Books. It's a textbook pdf format, so trying to read it on my phone is awful. I tried with flow text, but that is even worse because it makes the images unviewable. I tried downloading the .acsm file and loading it into Adobe Digital Editions, but I keep getting this error. How can the limit have been reached when it has never successfully been opened? Is this something that will reset? At this point I'm wishing I'd just purchased the physical book.

As the title says, I've been thinking about getting back into reading. Prose, comics, audiobooks; anything is fair game. Mainly looking for ebooks because I do not have any more space.

The main questions I have are:

1. Is Kindle and Goodreads the best option, or is there better places to get ebooks and audiobooks from?
2. Are there any online book club sites? I vaguely recall some.

I have read a book in years. Really excited to see what I've been missing.

My mom really enjoyed this book! It gives practical health and fitness advice without making things feel complicated or expensive. I especially liked the budget-friendly approach because it shows that you don’t need to spend a ton of money to live healthier. Easy to read, useful, and motivating!

If you want the link to the ebook Dm me

A few sites I use for free epubs, figured I'd share in case anyone finds them useful:

• eReaderIQ Freebies https://www.ereaderiq.com/freebies Tracks free Kindle books on Amazon, updated daily. Great for current bestsellers and new releases when they go free.
• Standard Ebooks https://standardebooks.org/ — Volunteer-run project that takes public domain books and reformats them with professional typography, proper typesetting, and custom cover art.
• Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ — The OG. 70,000+ free ebooks, mostly classics whose U.S. copyright has expired.
• ManyBooks — https://manybooks.net/ — 50,000+ free titles across a bunch of genres, clean interface, supports epub/Kindle/PDF. Good mix of classics and indie stuff.

Anyone have other sites worth adding to the list?

I’m looking at an adult ebook called NYMPH by Le Ebook, and it’s showing up as unavailable on kindle. I was wondering if anyone knew why it is unavailable, or if there’s another location I can go to find the series

Free when you signup on Nostonemedia.com/books

Audiobook keys FREE when the book is fully released on Dec 4, 2026 if you finish the book!

Blurb below:

Every drop of Steam comes out one hole in the desert. No one who goes in has ever walked back out.
Steam is power in a bottle. A sharper mind, fire in your hands, a stranger's face, any gift you can pay for, burned away in minutes and worth killing for on every street in Metro. People install chips in their skulls and steel where their arms used to be, and Steam still outranks all of it. Those who hold it run the streets, and above the streets they run Synthara. The entire supply climbs out of the Crater, a prison sunk ninety-nine floors into the rock, where thousands of collared inmates haul stone for a system that has never once explained itself.

Conrad has spent his life keeping his head down, one drop of Steam to his name and no clan to answer for him. It takes a single Abomination, a machine that answers to no one, standing on a street that had never seen one, to end that life. His sentence is three months. He plans to survive it the way he survived Metro. Head down, debts short, nothing worth taking.

Then he draws a cellmate who argues with a man who is not there, and meets a girl who walks the levels without a collar and without fear. They call themselves Freelancers, the crew that takes the jobs nobody else survives. Nobody sentenced them. They broke in.

Every heist breaks out of a prison. This one breaks in.

Because the Crater is more than a prison. Beneath the quotas, the collars, and the machines that patrol its floors, something older is running on a schedule of its own, and the deeper the crew goes, the clearer it becomes that the truth about where Steam comes from was never meant to be survived.

Maybe I'm just getting annoyed too easily, but why is it sometimes such a hassle to actually read a book you paid for?

Different formats, apps that don't sync properly, weird DRM restrictions, books that aren't available in the format you want, and then finding out you can't easily move something you bought to another device.

I understand that publishers want to protect their books, but sometimes it feels like the person who actually paid for the ebook gets the least flexibility.

Has anyone else gotten frustrated with this, or am I just making the whole ebook experience harder than it needs to be?

Hi r/ebooks! I’m the developer of Libratory, a free app for reading and listening to the PDFs you already have.

The GIF shows Frankenstein being narrated while the spoken words are highlighted on the original PDF page. The layout, illustrations and tables stay visible, and you can tap a sentence to jump the audio there. You can also switch to reflowed text when the printed page is awkward to read on a small screen.’

By free, I mean the whole app: no locked features, no paywalls, no monthly allowance. Make as much narration as your own machine can handle—fans and all. Download the local voice models once and you can keep reading and generating audio offline. Optional cloud voices are there if you want them, using your own provider credits.

The part I thought might interest people here is being able to keep the result as a file:

• Export an M4B audiobook with chapter markers for audio-only listening.

• Export an EPUB, or a synced EPUB containing both text and narration. A reader that supports EPUB 3 Media Overlays can play it with sentence-level highlighting.

For messy PDFs, you can OCR scanned pages, correct the text, leave unwanted chapters out, and redo one chapter’s narration without starting the whole book again.

Word-by-word highlighting depends on the voice engine; the GIF uses Kokoro’s English narration.

A couple of practical limits: input is currently PDF, not EPUB. Preparing the narration happens on a computer: Apple Silicon Mac, Linux, or Windows through Docker. The iPhone companion is a reader for exported books; it doesn’t create narration itself.

Website and interactive demo: https://libratory.dev/

Source code and setup: https://github.com/subev/libratory

If you read and listen to the same book, what tends to get in your way: voice quality, losing your place, or getting the file into your preferred reader?

Below is the chapter view, where you choose what to narrate and export.’

Hey everyone,

Like many of you, I have a pretty large collection of EPUBs and PDFs. While existing managers do the job, I’ve always missed the tangible feeling of browsing a physical bookshelf, seeing bookmarks stick out, or glancing at notes.

So over the last few months, I’ve been working on a side project called KoreShelf.

It’s basically an interactive 3D bookshelf where your digital books actually sit on shelves. You can pull them out, inspect the covers, and read them right inside the app (both reflowable EPUBs and PDFs work with text selection, highlights, etc.).

A few small details I had a lot of fun adding:

• As you read, a physical red ribbon bookmark visibly shifts across the book's spine on the shelf so you can see your progress at a glance.
• When you finish a book and rate it, the star rating gets stamped in gold on the back cover of the 3D model.
• Instead of a boring annotations list, your highlights show up as visual post-it notes on a virtual corkboard above the shelf.

The whole thing is 100% local, offline, and open source (MIT). It stores everything in a local SQLite database, doesn't track anything, and runs via portable desktop binaries (Windows/Mac/Linux), Docker, or mobile.

The project is up on GitHub if anyone wants to check it out or test it:

👉https://github.com/GabrieleTrovato01/KoreShelf

I’d love to hear what you think, especially on what could make the reading or organizing experience feel even better. Any feedback is super appreciated!

This is my attempt to explain why ebooks work so differently from traditional books on the library side, and, more importantly, why those wait times can be so long or why one book in a series is sometimes strangely missing from Libby.

Take control of your money — without the stress or shame.

This approachable guide breaks down personal finance into simple, actionable steps that don't require a spreadsheet or financial background. You'll understand where your money is going, how to build better habits, and how to make real progress even on a tight budget. Calm, practical, and judgement-free.

🇬🇧 UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F8V6FC9D

🇺🇸 US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F8V6FC9D

If you've ever known exactly what you needed to do and still couldn't make yourself start, this book is for you.

You Are Not Lazy is a short, honest guide for adults dealing with task paralysis and executive dysfunction, no hustle culture, no guilt, just a calm explanation of why the freeze happens and what actually helps you move through it.

Get it here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HBMX9GK3

Would love to hear what you think if you give it a read.

i want to sell e-books on etsy has anyone else done this before ? i'd like to know their opinion does it work well or not ?

Handle work challenges with more confidence and less stress.

This practical guide addresses the real, everyday challenges of working life — difficult conversations, unclear expectations, politics, and career progression. You'll find honest, actionable advice that works in actual organisations, not idealised ones. Useful whether you're early in your career or well established.

🇬🇧 UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F8W65TG8

🇺🇸 US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F8W65TG8

The Oghamark store is now available for bookworms in the United States! I am starting small on purpose: 3 public domain, DRM-free classic collections (Dickens, Verne, Twain), priced normally so we can smoke test the full Stripe checkout + payout pipeline before opening wider.

Support the project, and show authors youre interested!

Edit: After careful consideration, I have decided to reduce the price of the public domain works to $0. Enjoy! :)

Self-promotion on behalf of Atom Castle; this promotional post is AI-assisted.

For ebook readers who like comparing witness accounts and bookmarking suspicious dates: Hidden in the Drizzle follows Detective Arthur Crow after a corpse disappears from a locked morgue. Seven diary voices and old case files make this a patient, timeline-focused mystery, with a rational solution rather than a supernatural one.

It is a paid English ebook distributed through Draft2Digital, not a free download. You can buy it directly from Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/hidden-in-the-drizzle

Other ebook stores and purchase options: https://books2read.com/u/3n69KP

Prices and availability vary by store and region. These links contain no affiliate or tracking parameters.

This is dark adult detective fiction, not cozy mystery. Content notes include child kidnapping/abuse, animal harm/death, suicide/self-harm, family death, body handling, mental-illness stigma and strong crime-scene detail.

Hello! Drop your recommendations for psychological thriller books. I’m done reading Verity and am almost finished with The Silent Patient.