it's all so tiresome

This is why you buy old/original copies of everything. Books, Movies, TV Shows, etc..

Then preserve them yourself digitally. When I get time I am going to build one of those book machines that flips it page after page, takes a image then feeds it into OCR to digitize.

Also, any time you are in a large or small city, find a local (used) book shop and see if they have old editions of books you are interested in having a copy of. That way you can get it how it was intended to be not how it became because of "modern audiences".