I'm wondering how people find reading books on a desktop computer.

Humble currently has a scifi book bundle yet I've never read anything longer than a brief PDF on my desktop. I'm poor and don't have a kindle or anything like that. I'm thinking that while I love reading, reading a book is far easier on the eyes than reading hundreds of pages of black text on a glowing white screen, still worse if I read several books.

Just curious what people's experience has been reading books on a desktop.

depends on what OS your talking about. for windows there is
Windows

For Apple there is
Mac

for linux there is
linux

Basicaly it's a piece of software that allows you to read the format of an ebook.

I personally prefer my Kindle as it's less then a pound and I can take it everywhere, but I have read on the PC technical manuals it's not that much different as you can adjust text size on each.

I'm using a reader/viewer provided with Calibre. It allows you to customize looks of displayed books to your liking. You can set up things like background colour, text font, size and colour, area of text on your screen (sometimes a little bit of CSS may be necessary I think). I usually use some sort of dark text on sepia background or light green text on dark gray background.

Small edit: I stay away from PDFs as much as possible, when it comes to ebooks, I choose epub or mobi formats.

I've read a couple of books on my PC monitor but I probably never will again since it is tiring especially in long sittings. There are options like this filter from Amazon that you put over your screen, seems to have good reviews so maybe it works really well.

You can also invert the colors so they don't strain your eyes so much, I find that much easier to read more in bulks. pdf readers are best when they're opensource, non-clunky and very fast. Never support kindle, it's expensive and it's DRM. Amazon is known for remote-deleting ebooks among others.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/ebook-drm-5-reasons-to-free-your-kindle-library/ (it's a little dated but still holds.)

I prefer these;

Windows:
https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ebookdroid

Linux:
qpdfview and mupdf (Sometimes even firefox)

You can also find a lot of free books online, like on http://www.gutenberg.org/, and other places...

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=free+ebooks&ia=list

With flux you can reduce, and even automate the brightness and the blue tint based on your location/suns cycle: For Win, Linux, and Android
https://justgetflux.com/

I can definitely recommend calibre. It organises your collection, provides a reader, can connect to devices to move files over, and it is free. Can't get better than that. Personally I wouldn't read on the desktop or laptop, it can tire eyes quickly, even and iPad. Readers generally have a special screen to emulate paper and be low light, perfect for reading. You can get cheap ones. Me I use a kobo aurora which while nice is very slow.

Having a monitor that is kind on the eyes is a big plus. I prefer reading on my oldest monitor as that one is best for text and things like inaccurate colours, slow response times and small size do not matter as it still is way bigger than the mobile or a tablet anyway. Technically easier than using some e-book readers.

I have an epub ereader plugin for Firefox on my laptop. I use it for technical manuals and stuff like that. I don;t use it for casual reading. I either use my broken iPad or my more recent Amazon Fire.

I find it a terrible experience. I've got an e-reader and also the desktop app, but I used the desktop to read only once. Hated it.

Thank you all, I appreciate your links! I guess I will buy some of the Humble books and see how it goes. Hopefully I won't go blind. If I start having atrocious spelling, you'll know what happened.

I'll generally use the web version of the store, but if the shop doesn't have one and it's DRM free, I personally like Calibre.

Most decent software should have a nightmode that uses mostly black instead of white and if not, you can use software to change the desktop for something more suitable at night. Usually, it'll remove most of the blue from the color palate making it something that's less likely to keep you up at night and probably be a bit less bright in general.
You can also get free public domain books from Google and see if the reading experience is acceptable. Given that you're not budgeted for a tablet or ereader, you may be better off just sticking to used paperbacks if the reading experience is unpleasant.

I've used all the popular PDF readers for Linux. While Calibre is the best, I can't say it's a good experience. Scrolling down and then flipping pages is unnatural, getting ebooks to work nicely with custom themes was a bit of a pain. It didn't reflow properly all the time.

I much prefer using my phone.