I use varying IRC servers based on my mood, as I don’t use it with other people.

For general IRC chatting I use weechat + tmux on libera.

As mentioned before, matrix might be a better solution for you. If you really want IRC, I can send you my latest rather stable setup.

Depending on where you live, you can borrow ebooks from regional libraries. In my case, those are veeeeeeery many and also they can mostly be stripped of DRM.