A Bit of Electronic Advice

[ecosophia]

These days an enormous amount of old occult literature is available in PDF format. For ecological reasons, I'd prefer not to print out everything on paper, and it gets old having to sit at my computer desk rather than lounging on the couch, so I'm considering picking up some kind of electronic e-reader for the purpose. The difficulty, of course, is that I'm about twenty years out of date when it comes to technology and I have no idea what's available. 

What I'm looking for is a simple device that will allow me to read PDFs. I don't want it to be connected to the internet if I can avoid that, and I certainly don't want it to be dependent on one of the big predatory internet firms; I can get all the books I want from archive.org and iapsop.com, and I'm not averse from using USB drives to get them to my e-reader. 

Do such devices exist? Have you used one? Would you recommend it? Inquiring Druids want to know. 

(If I can get it used, that would be a plus -- I prefer to get all my technology that way, to keep things out of the e-waste stream..)

Comments

I like my old kindle

[yellopig]

I have a really old kindle. I rarely connected it to the Internet, and because of that I missed a software update, and now I cannot connect to the Internet.

BUT I could connect it to my computer (via USB cable), and the computer just thought it was a big disk drive. So I could copy kindle-compatible files to it from the computer and they show up on the device's index. (Other brands probably work the same.)

Gutenburg & archive.org provide most books in kindle/mobi format, which is a bit more convenient than PDFs, re navigation within the book. I think kindle will also show you PDFs too, but they're not as convenient to get around in.

Unfortunately, my old computer forgot how to see mass-storage USB devices, so I'm not using the kindle at the moment. When I get a new computer (soon—fingers crossed!), I'll go back to the kindle for books (rather than the iPad), because I liked how light-weight and energy efficient the kindle is, in comparison.

Old, defunct kindles like mine are dirt cheap.