Unless he's a younger than 26 years old Admiral in SNW then we can assume he predates the Kelvin timeline divergence.
The novels have the same hit/miss ratio as the episodes, IMO. Some are amazing and I blaze through them in a few days, others are soul-destroying slogs any sane man (i.e. not me) would have given up on 40 pages in. There are more printed stories than episodes, so trying to read it all is a bigger task than most are up to. They're sometimes used as inspiration for the episodes and that's fine. You don't see Marvel fans get cranky that the base the movies on their books
Sure, I read quite a bit and not just Star Trek. I also never said every one of Diane Carey's Trek books is great but I love Final Frontier and Best Destiny in particular and they are about April and George Kirk. I also never said every single Star Trek book is good either .There are definitely certain authors that usually write better stories than others like Peter David, Greg Cox, David Mack. Obviously you read the good ones.
April was 75 in TAS so I can easily buy April in SNW being a 64-year-old man given how much white is in his beard. He'd also be only seven years older than Philippa Georgiou in this universe as she was born in 2202 based on her visible Starfleet personnel file in Season 1 of DSC.
I stopped when They started publishing multiple books every other month while TNG, DS-9 & Voyager were running. It was getting to expensive and some of them weren't all that great anyway.
Going back to when I was a student, I have always used the local library network which has a ton of Star Trek books. I still use it to this day and I only buy the best Trek books that I know I will reread.
Is it too much of a supposition to assume Kirsten might get some April novels details incorporated into SNW?
No, the 1990s Roddenberry canon rules and what he said are apocryphal (per the 1990s Star Trek Encyclopedia for example) are being reinstated. TAS, ST5 and ST6 aren't canon anymore. We should've seen this coming since no mention of Sybok in Discovery.
Some would have us believe they can be damaged or even bulldozed(!) from great distances by unseen, nefarious agents. If so, I suspect witchcraft is afoot.
I really liked what we've seen of Captain April in SNW so far. Adrian Holmes has a commanding presence. I hope he is a recurring character, a la Admiral Forest in ENT. Further, I would love to see SNW flashbacks or episodes of his time as captain on the Enterprise (it might be too much to hope for a series, but maybe a miniseries or Short Trek). In lieu of that I hope we get novels and comics about him.
Gene didn't consider TAS canon (because he was being petty over who owned the rights) and didn't like those movies, that's the joke.