sugarsweat

Most of my ebooks are large as they are comics. You also have EPUB3 ebooks now, which can contain images and audio in them too (think combined ebook + audiobook). So they can get pretty large.

… comics and manga, which is another aspect I’ve been noticing calibre does not do such a great job

Absolutely. Calibre is horrible with anything that is fixed format. I recently backed up my entire Kindle library with about 1k manga volumes, expecting to be able to convert from KFX to EPUB format as I have been doing for my regular books for 15+ years. Calibre failed awfully at this. The only thing it’s reasonably good at with comics, is converting to ZIP format. So I had to write a Python script to take the KFX -> ZIP outputs from Calibre and convert them into working EPUB files.

This is what they’re referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG/

UNBGBBIIVCHIDCTIICBG is an abbreviation for “Upvoted Not Because Girl, But Because It Is Very Cool; However, I Do Concede That I Initially Clicked Because Girl”.

For me, I mainly use Bandcamp, 7digital & Qobuz for Western music. Sometimes the artists sell directly from their own sites though; for e.g. I bought Willow’s empathogen album directly from her website.

For Japanese music, I use Ototoy. They accept foreign cards, but for some releases they won’t let you add it to the cart unless you use a VPN set to Japan.

For less available stuff, I sometimes buy second hand CDs from Discogs / eBay / Music Magpie / similar sites, rip and then resell the CD if I don’t wish to keep it.

For new CDs that I do want to keep, I buy from wherever the artist is selling. CDJapan for Japanese stuff.