Creators, afaik, make money mostly from merchandises, patreons, memberships, superchats,… not ads.

Ads are how Google makes money, which is fine in principle, except that Youtube is supposedly a “hosting platform” with all privileges associated, eg not being subjected to broadcast regulations, but acts like a broadcaster by promoting some content over another according to what’ll make them more money. If the internet worked like Youtube, you’d type wikipedia’s url in your browser, and instead it’ll redirect to some ad-ridden clone.

I use Calibre to manage my librairy on my NAS, and COPS (https://github.com/seblucas/cops) to access it from anywhere. COPS just read the Calibre database saved on the NAS, and displays it as a self-hosted web site with all categories (authors, ratings, languages,…) and download links.