Supernote is an eNotebook and is writing focused rather than book focused, but it uses a stripped down fork of android and you can easily side load other android apps onto it including e.g. F-droid. You can use it without an account and with no network connectivity (loading content via USB), or your choice of cloud providers, including recently self-hosted storage.

I mostly read library books so unfortunately I have to go through Kindle, but you can use the Kindle app on the device and it works pretty well. Not as many features as a dedicated device, but the basics work great.

Major caveat: it’s not backlit so you need a book light/lamp/headlamp, which is a big pain.

Depends what the grade structure is like, in my one college CS class homework could probably have been GPT’d (didn’t exist yet) but tests were 75% of your grade and were handwritten in a proctored hall. Mostly they involved pseudocode and showing knowledge of data structures and algorithms rather than specific coding requirements. That couldn’t be GPT’d, at least not with competent proctors and a time limit, so you couldn’t pass without some competence even if the specific coding syntax went over your head.

I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.

Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.