After arriving to a new country and seeing different ppl (I.e. non-white) asked the question “Ok, but where are you really from?”, I realised asking about roots could be seen as rude by association.

I defaulted to asking, if the conversation heads that way, “Did you grow up around here?” As I see this question assumes you’re a local, and at the same time it’s broad enough for others to respond however they want.

Have you considered a torrent based solution?

Setup a torrenting server hosted online somewhere with fast speeds (e.g. Netherlands), sync it with gdrive, create a torrent for your books, and “download” your books to the toreenting machine.

This approach won’t help with upload speed, but it should help with reliability/continuity. As long as you seed from your home computer, your books will eventually make it into your gdrive.

Although with this setup it might be easier to just torrent the ebooks to the online server from sources other than yourself.