Buy European

I've used Nextory which was fine, didn't use it enough to keep the subscription going but their library quite alright. Often only audiobook or only ebook which was a bummer from time to time, but considering they had a lot in my language it was fine.

Usually a local library will have an free affiliate website for listening to and/or downloading audio books. "Overdrive" was the one I used in Canada.

Kobo for ebooks, not becuse it's an alternative to Kindle, but because it's better

Check your local library. My city's library has online services for ebooks and audiobooks which are included in the yearly fee.

An alternative to Kindle would be PocketBook, originally Ukrainian, with its current headquarters in Switzerland, and manufactured in Taiwan. I've used their ebook readers for years now, great stuff.

Apart from Storytel, I also know Bookbeat, but haven't tried the latter. Storytel was good though, reliable, decent selection, nothing special beyond that.

Rakuten Kobo for ebooks is pretty good

I already had a kindle reader so I've chosen not cause more pollution by replacing it.

Now I buy my books from smaller local bookstores as digital editions, use a small tool called knock to change it a epub then use calibre to put it on my kindle for reading.

I particularly like that this way I can also share it with my friends and family as if it were a real book.

See also https://lemmy.ca/post/40253303

As far as I can tell, the closest thing to a European supplier of ereaders is Pocketbook. They have much better privacy policies than most of their competition. From what I gather most of their line up is pretty good, I didn't read great things on their note-taking 10" device when I checked it around Christmas time (pretty slow, apparently).

Tolino devices are for the most part rebranded Kobos, though I'm not sure how much the firmware differs, and it may very useful if you desire a high Integration wirh the european bookstores, which should at least have to respect GDPR to a meaningful degree.

All non-kindle eBook stores use the same Adobe DRM anyway.

On any ereader, the first thing I would do is still install Koreader right away.

I use storytel for some years now, it is good, it has content even tho less than audible. Some more popular books are missing, but they seem to be expanding their collection. There are also some very stupid features like you can't bookmark offline for some reason. And once they deleted a book that I was reading, it wasn't good book, but I wanted to finish it 😁.

There are stores in many European countries that sell DRM-free e-books in local languages. They might use the term watermarked instead of DRM-free. See if you can find one in your country. Because they are DRM-free, you can use any device to read them.

Many libraries also lets you rent audiobooks and e-books. Many European libraries have moved to using Readium LCP DRM for e-books. You will probably have to use their own app to read them, which means you can't use e-readers, such as Kobo to read them.