What in the world are you doing here??? This is just a static web site with no particular purpose created by an old semi-Luddite who misses Gopher clients and wishes that they could still surf the pre-2000s Web with Netscape Navigator. Look, here's a random animated GIF to prove it:
There are no cookies, no scripts, no tracking (aside from my web host noting your IP address), no interactive elements, no "AI", and no ads here.
All opinions expressed are my own, and do not reflect the dominant world view, nor any corporate agenda. There is nothing to doom scroll on here, no misinformation that I am aware of, nothing to buy. (There may be links to things you can buy. If so, they are not affiliate links, and are simply things that I like.)
In other words, this does not belong on the World Wide Web of the mid-21st century. So how did you end up here? Well, however you got here, I wish you peace, and would encourage you to strive for kindness in all that you do.
Perhaps I have been giving the impression that I am not fond of the present day Internet? (I believe I saw somewhere that it is now customary not to capitalize "Internet", but to me the globe-spanning one will always be "the big I Internet".) Anyway, do I like it? Well, mostly, no.
I have always been fond of email, but these days it is mostly just used for marketing, whether legitimate or spam. I appreciate the friends who still use it for actual communication, but they become fewer all the time.
I can only tolerate the World Wide Web when using a browser with a host of ad- and tracking-blockers enabled. Even then, there are vast swaths of it that I never want to see. But there are a few bright spots. Wikipedia is imperfect, but still quite useful, when read with a critical eye. I am quite fond of LibraryThing for cataloging my books.
And there is the Fediverse. It has its challenges: Which protocol(s) and software will work best for me? Which instance(s)/server(s) should I join? Or should I spin up my own? But actually putting a bit of thought into your social networking is no bad thing. Like anything, the Fediverse has its bad actors, but it also has numerous built in ways to deal with them, both at a personal and at a server level. The basic idea of the Fediverse is decentralized social networking that cannot be controlled by any individual or corporation, with no algorithms and no ads. At the moment I am most fond of Friendica, which is a lot like the facething, pre-ads and pre-algorithms. It can also connect to the rest of the Fediverse, and actually to quite a lot else. If you are interested in learning more about the Fediverse, Join the fediverse! is a good place to start.
I love reading, and I especially love reading physical books. I will read ebooks on my Kobo, but that is definitely the distant second choice. Reading a book-length work on my computer screen would be quite unpleasant for me.
When I decide to read a book the steps that I take to seek it go in approximately this order:
On rare occasions, my search ends with the discovery that the only way the book is available is on Kindle. In that case, I simply do not read the book.
Oh. I forgot one step. If the book is out of copyright, I will check Project Gutenberg for the ebook. For instance, one of my favorite books, William Morris' News from Nowhere, is available here.
Some of my favorite physical bookstores include Bound Together Bookstore in San Francisco, Powell's City of Books in Portland, and countless shops in London. For genre books, Borderlands Books in San Francisco and Dark Carnival Bookstore in Berkeley are wonderful places to browse, and to buy.
As far as online bookstores go, PM Press has a lot of interesting books, and are very friendly. For a large, general online bookstore, I usually use Bookshop. And for ebooks, as alluded to above, I generally try to learn where the author prefers that I buy their ebooks. Barring that, I will check their publisher's website, then sites like Smashwords and Weightless Books (also great for digital versions of genre magazines). I try to avoid ebooks with DRM, because I do not want to be stuck with vendor lock-in.