eBooks and eBook readers feel a little stagnant at the moment. No significant increases in tech, the storefronts are stagnant and locked down with DRM, and it just isn't really an exciting field.

That said, I love my Kindle Paperwhite because it lets me get English books for cheaper (I live in Japan) and it lets me carry them around.

Do you use an eBook reader? Do you read eBooks on a standard tablet or phone? Or are you married to paper?

Comixology: https://comixology.com/unlimited
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/promoLanding?tag=ter000-20&ascsubtag=d9489bc654b311eabfd92ecf0bfff0bf0INT&promoCode=7cad7d39-c2cf-4e3d-9b17-4ebafbb03a41

I read a lot (my wife gets mad at me because I read so much faster than her), and these days I do most of my reading on Kindle. Fortunately there are ways to do this for little or no money. If you're interested here are some ways to get more ebooks without spending a lot of money:

1. Project Gutenberg is the grandparent of free book sites, with 60K+ public domain works.
2. MobileRead has an entire forum for fresh uploads of public domain works in Kindle format (they have other formats too).
3. The Libby app (iOS/Android) makes it trivially easy to borrow ebooks from your local library.
4. The Hoopla app (iOS/Android) is another way to borrow from your local library.
5. The Library Extension browser add-on (Chrome/Firefox) will alert you when a book that you're looking at online (say, on an Amazon product page) is available at your local library. (This covers print as well as ebooks)
6. BookBub will send you a daily email with books that are currently on sale at the major ebook stores.
7. I'm not sure how I got into this one; I think it was when I registered a new Kindle for Christmas. But in any case, Amazon is currently in the mode of offering me a $1 ebook credit on every order I have shipped, as long as I'm willing to take non-prime shipping and wait a few days. As far as I can tell this option is available on every Prime order, so I shamelessly take advantage. Need a $4 USB-C cable to replace one that's fraying? Hey, I can get it a few days later and add $1 to my credits. Until they stop this, I'll keep breaking every order up into individual single-item orders. It's not even worse for the planet, because their warehouse software recombines everything into as few boxes as it can anyhow.

Project Gutenberg is a great resource for free books, but its 50,000+ titles are intimidating in number (if not outright impenetrable). The same goes for other free ebook aggregators/feeds, of which there are many. There are also lots of authors who offer up their books for free. And, of course, there are tons of free options available in, say, the Kindle store. While it's nice to have so many choices, it hinders discoverability. Individual books get lost in all the noise.

As such, I'd like to know: what are some standout, recommended books that are available to readers for free?

Obvious disclaimer: I am not interested in pirated content.

I ask because I have several physical books that I would love to have digital copies of.

Most of the services out there are destructive, so you lose the book when you send it in to scan. I'm fine with this in theory, except for the fact that I'd hate to lose the physical book and have it replaced with a crappy digital copy. I've not had terribly great luck with my own attempts at OCR with documents (but I'm also not a professional).

Additionally, some of the books I want to scan have extensive footnotes. The ideal would be that the book gets scanned and edited to have these footnotes hyperlinked in the resulting ebook, but I don't know if anyone offers that kind of service. I'd even be okay with the footnotes just being eliminated if it's too much trouble. What I don't want is them just being flowed into the main text of the document.

There are a lot of different options out there, and I'm more than willing to pay for a good job. Has anyone used one of these services and can speak to their quality?

A while ago there was a post comparing e-books and hard copies. After chatting with a few people, I was convinced to spend the money on a Kindle to replace reading on my laptop.
It's an amazing difference and I'd recommend it to anyone who reads on a "normal" screen. My eyes don't get tired, night reading is more comfortable, I've got 40 books in my pocket, the screen really is glare free, and I've charged it once in a week and a half.
So if you read e-books, get a reader with the e-ink screen. It's worth it, and thanks to those who convinced me.