How are people getting on with brail displays and the books app on IOS 16? What brail device are you using?

Same here with my Focus Braille Display. In addition it seems that VoiceOver quite often does not show me a certain part of a line so I only can read a half of a sentence. It is not a pleasant experience for sure.

I used to do a lot of uploading PDF's (user guides and such) into Books for easy reading. Even before this new update, I found PDF reading with VO wasn't very good. For example, if you were in the Table Of Contents, and VO detected the text on a certain page, the display would freeze for a few seconds while the text was read aloud. I also couldn't use the Turn Pages When Panning feature on my display, now, I just do it into files. Based on what's happening in Books right now, I'm glad I started using Files instead of Books for PDF's!
Sometimes the display will freeze for a few seconds when first entering the area where the book is written, and VO sometimes takes sometime to realize what's happening, but then a bunch of words are split and speech will be going in and out constantly, and I can tell that if I could plug my USB headphones in right about then it would be doing that crackling thing it does when VO is having trouble keeping focus or something (still don't know the true origin of that sound but that's a different story). For now I have my iPad for Books, but it won't be forever it's stuck on ipados 15.7 until ipados 16 comes out. I really hope this gets fixed.

Yes I use Files app for PDF's
Ipad os 15.7 I said. I can read most books fine on my ipad, though some that just don't want to work since a long time ago, and the issues new on my iphone on ios16 that I described. I haven't found a workaround either.

Oliver,

Here is just my two cents on the reading apps that I either use regularly or have tried in the past. Hopefully someone in this community can point you to a resource that you can tolerate so you can enjoy all those books! Yes, I'm running iOS 16 on my phone. Sometimes I'm a loser and do work-related reading on my phone.

Kindle

Text will not always wrap, and there will be an unnecessary amount of blank space. I also noticed that there is a delay if I manually pan. The tradeoff to not panning is that focus will skip ahead in the book. This seems to be triggered most often when I want to manually pan back a few lines to reread anything I might have missed. I tolerate it because I only use Kindle for my pleasure reading.

Apple Books

I cannot tolerate reading in Apple Books for very long. First, my phone needs to be in reach so I can touch the middle of the screen (where the text is). This isn't really a big issue for me, but compounded with the other issues I routinely have with Apple Books, it's something that I find irritating read. I find that the focus issues when reverse panning are multiplied tenfold in Apple Books. I also can't navigate by chapter because focus places me a few sentences before the start of the chapter. When I pan to the beginning of the chapter, focus jumps backward and/forward and I can't consistently return. Sometimes I can scroll by page and touch "chapter 5" on the screen, but that is so inefficient. I don't use the Books app unless I absolutely have to.

Voice Dream Reader

For the most part, I like Voice Dream Reader. The only thing I need to do is 1( touch the middle of the screen where the text starts and 2) put up with reverse panning focus issues. Nowadays, I would only use Voice Dream Writer for casual use.

Files App

Someone mentioned that they read PDFs in the files app. I don't because I find that I don't see line breaks. This is information I want, but it's a matter of personal preference.

Speech Central

I really like reading in Speech Central. I don't experience any unnecessarily weird spacing (unless the document is poorly formatted and tagged), and I can pan, reverse pan, and auto-scroll as I please. The tradeoff is that my reading position doesn't sync because I need to pause the text to read it with a braille display. I suppose I could set a bookmark and navigate to said bookmark. Bookmarks are designed for people who use text-to-speech. It's still useful to set booksmarks, but you can't just pick up a book and immediately begin reading where you left off.

Google Drive

I wouldn't read books in Google Drive for the same reason I wouldn't read them in Speech Central, but if someone shares a document with me, I'll read it in Google Drive before I move it to a more permanent place. I just pulled up a PDF to skim as I am typing this message and it works well. No large never-ending blocks of text to deal with!

Google Drive is good for reading docs, but in my experience always redirects me to Docs/Slides/Sheets, depending on the file format (document, slideshow, Spreadsheet), and there are some bugs with Google Docs especially, one which I mentioned in the Google Docs app directory comments, where the document will almost always throw you back to the beginning when you type a word or exit the text field and go back in, regardless whether you have flash messages on, but that seems to be fixed. You still need to put your cursor on the end of a word and then start pressing the next cursor routing buttons in order until the cursor is on a reliable space that you can actually write in (preferably at the end of a line), and then focus will jump to the beginning of the doc until you move out of the edit field and then back in, and won't happen again until you pan a few times and then move your cursor.
You still also can't reliably write in a table. Especially if there is a colon or other symbol (I find this worst with the colon, exclamation, and question marks because they're actually are the same symbols in computer braille as contractions in literary braille) it will somehow switches to computer braille, and when I try to type, it will mess it up in Literary Braille, and show up as which or this or the or whatever, but you can't delete that or start over, because it will keep getting worse. This is hard to describe but open google docs with a table and try messing up while writing in it, then backspacing the seeing what happens.
Another app I recommend for reading is the Dolphin EasyReader app, you can login to Bookshare or CELA or Calibreor a bunch of other ones. There are a few bugs when using a braille display, as mentioned at the bottom of the Dolphin EasyReader post (I have a lot of stuff at the bottom since I'm relatively new here), but they're not real dealbreakers, at least not for me.
HTH