jeffers wrote: You mentioned a couple of Andre Klein books, but I don't think any are on your initial list of books. He's got at least 12 books in the Dino Lernt Deutsch series, and at least another 5 beginner books in his Baumgartner and Mortimer series, so there are quite a few decent beginner's books available if you want to keep it easy for now. Another author who has a lot of easy German readers is Brian Smith. His "German Easy Reader" series has 3 easy, 1 pre-intermediate, and 3 intermediate books, all with audio you can download for free. The books are quality, and use a carefully restricted vocabulary. I've read the 3 easy readers, and they're unfortunately rather boring. But sometimes the feeling of "Wow, I understand all this!!" trumps a dull story. Since then he's churned out a set of 23 graded readers (mostly A1-A2, a couple B1 and one B2 volume). I have no idea of the quality, but I'll probably try a few of them later this year. The problem for your preferences is all of these books are quite reasonably priced on Kindle, but the paperbacks are a little pricey, although still better value than the traditional little readers like "Elvis in Koln" and "Oh Maria".
I have all of Andre Klein's Dino books (maybe not the last one) and need to start them. I tried the first one way too early, got frustrated and haven't gone back. I could do them now. And I really want to get into his Baumgartner and Mortimer series, but I've look at the preview on Amazon, and still too far beyond me. For now.
Brian Smith. Yes, I have several of his books, and yes the early ones are boring. The one I was reading was a really long story about a family that went to the woods for a picnic and I was honestly hoping for a bear to appear. He's lately come out with a new big series of targeted books--Horror stories, mystery stories, sci-fi stories, etc.. My Sexy and Romantic Stories is one of his. His writing may be great for language learning, but the stories just don't pull me in. But I plan to read all the ones that I have.
I do buy all of my books as paperbacks. I like being able to lightly underline words, or put post-it notes in the book. I do have a few German books on my Kindle and I've yet to be able to figure out how to count pages with them. Most of them I went back to Amazon to see how many pages were in the same book in paperback and then used that number. If I can work that out, there are actually quite a few books available through Kindle Unlimited.