What is your "inexpensive" hobby that turned out to be expensive/ you gradually invested lots of money into?
Edit: so it turns out that every hobby can be expensive if you do it long enough.
Also I love how you talk about your hobby as some addicts.
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Simple, I read. And with the internet I never have to worry about buying books.
How's the price of the external hard drive hitting you?
-A fellow bookworm with maxed out storage.
How do you have enough books to max out storage! I have an entire collection of about 5k books and 4-5 comics downloaded on my 32 gb eink
Book+audio book bundles often enough. Tabletop reference materials.
One thing you can try out for storage is buying regular 2.5" solid state drives (the kind you install in a computer) and using a SATA to USB adapter to plug it in. It's probably less durable than a proper external SSD, but gives you a path forward if you later want to install them into some kind of network storage server (or have a friend do it, if you're not sure how).
I haven't checked the prices very thoroughly, but you might be able to get the internal hard drives for cheaper as well. If you're willing to go with magnetic drives (3.5" HDDs), you can get bulk storage for (relatively) dirt cheap, of course at the cost of having a noisy drive spinning up each time you open a file on it.
Book files are tiny though. Even very long books with a bunch of pictures are only usually a few megabytes in epub format. A $5 USB stick should fit thousands of books on it.
If you're using PDF for books, then stop doing that :) PDFs have a bunch of limitations - the main ones being thay you can't change the font size, and it can't reflow the layout based on your screen size (i.e. format the book so a page exactly matches your screen size). They're hard to read on mobile as a result.
I don't have a ton of storage. My Raspberry pi400 which is my desktop has a 1TB and a 500GB SSD attached. I keep the Books folder synced with Google Drive along with my phone and Kindle Fire. My Book dir is: 58GB and has 18748 items (16970 files, 1777 folders). Gotta love zlib and Anna's.