How do you browse for e-books?

[primeideal]

Recently some of my colleagues mentioned they were going to try to do /r/fantasy's bingo, where you read 25 books from different authors fitting different themes over the course of a year. (Well, or five, but that's pretty straightforward.) And I was like...I read fast enough to do this if I committed, but I'm probably not going to commit, because I have all these e-books on my computer I haven't read. And the library left mask mandates in place for a long time and I'm not super interested in in-person browsing while those are still up. (Although they actually un-mandated them as of late February, I don't know if I was caught up on that, but that's my bad.)

And then I started looking into e-readers, because what if they're actually less eye-strainy and more portable than laptops? So long story short, I'm getting an e-reader soon. It might be a terrible idea, it might be a sunk-cost fallacy, it might still be impossible with migraines, but oh well! That's not what I need recommendations on.

What I need recommendations on is, if you're not walking up and down the aisles and maybe sometimes skimming the last page even though it won't make sense to get a feel for tone, how do you find new-to-you e-books of interest? There's a lot of new speculative stuff I can sort of tell won't be to my taste, and that's fine, I'd rather find a new author I love and devour a whole series by them than complete a bingo with "eating my vegetables" stuff. But I'm obviously years behind the curve here, so...advice?

(I may also do a list of "here's recent-ish stuff I enjoyed, here's stuff I tried and didn't like," in case that's useful. Are any of the review aggregators good for building predictions based on both those sets?)

Comments

[isis]

I almost always read ebooks! (On my phone - I use Moon+ Reader for books I own, which I liked enough to pay for, it's really cheap, and Libby for books from the library.)

The library's system through Libby lets me browse by genre and look at samples. But honestly mostly I go from recs on my fpage.

[primeideal]

Haha, well I'll keep my eyes peeled here then! ;)

[schneefink]

Mostly I check out what new e-books my library gets. They must have one curator who has great taste in SFF (either that or idk who decides what new books to get) and I found several things I enjoyed a lot. And a lot of times I go by recommendations from friends online (and then ask the library to get the ebooks, which most often works.)

[primeideal]

Cool! Lucky that your curator has good taste. :D

[cahn]

Ha, like others I get most of my book recs from my DW circle :) Kindle e-books are actually great because they'll give you a sample, and I've definitely bought books I was totally not meaning to buy because the sample was compelling and I didn't want to take the time to go to the library...