My e-book management currently consist of storing a bunch of files, both .epub, .pdf and .azw3 stored either by author (fiction) or by topic (non-fiction), for various sources (purchased e-books, downloaded via University subscriptions, Project Guthenberg and some from Library Genesis/Anna’s Archive). For some time I’d been wanting to organize them better, with a web UI to download in a format of my choice and to be able to share with others.
I first found out about and became interested in Booklore, as it seemed to fulfill my needs, and decided to research it more in-depth and oh boy, what drama… I am aware of the Grimmory fork, but I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole until it has matured and can be generally considered to be trustworthy.
So instead I started experimenting with the more established Calibre + Calibre-Web setup (I decided against Calibre Web Automated, as that also seemed a little shady). I find the UI of Calibre-Web to be fine enough for my use, but would have loved to be able to edit more metadata in the UI (it appears I am unable to add a cover for instance). But the Calibre server has so far been very frustrating to work with for me, and does not fit my desired workflow at all. I basically want to be able to dump my files onto my server (and continuously sync local files to the sever), get the metadata mostly automatically sorted with easy options to amend missing metadata (preferably from a web UI and not that screen-share thing that doesn’t even work in Librewolf). I have not found a way for it to automatically import new books, and if I reimport from the directory I dump my books in, it will reimport some of the books where the metadata was changed (some it will realize is the same, and ask to skip), so I end up with multiple duplicates. I work under the assumption that its mostly user errors so far, and I will try to master it better, but so far I find it very intuitive.
I will be looking more into Kavita as well, but so far I know very little about it.
How are you setup in your homelab for e-book management? Would love to see some examples of well-established workflows that works for you.
I just use Calibre-Web-Automated. I’m not a hoarder, I usually get one book at a time and I add it via the CWA web interface, often on my phone. Then I download it to my KOReader Tolino via OPDS.
While CWA indeed seems to be optimized for fully automated piracy, it’s working fine for the above-mentioned workflow as well.
I’ve been on Calibre Desktop before, which I used in a similar way, just with Syncthing instead of OPDS.
Openbooks downloading to Calibre’s auto ingestion folder, all running as a docker compose. OPDS service feeds FBreader on an Android tablet.
I almost wish I hadn’t started using FBReader. It’s ruined me for everything else.
Everytime I try a different reading app it just feels wrong.
I was looking into Kavita due to their support for manga! I believe most of the ebook readers either support .pdf/.epub style things meant for western books and seperate apps primarily support manga alone, Kavita seemed like the only mature service for all of it!
Grimmory all the way. Once I tried it I haven’t gone back to my CWA deployment at all. Also, Shelfmark is pretty cool.
I’ve said this in a few other contexts too, but Grimmory/Booklore, while imperfect is loads easier and nicer to use than CW or CWA. You aren’t managing a calibre db + a separate web layer, and this meant I could tighten up my organization significantly since I wasn’t required to be on my host machine.
For me the primary benefits above the interface is the metadata control you have from the web UI. You can dump all those files into a single ingest folder and it will attempt to match metadata with the ability to apply all, or pick and choose as you see fit.
From what I’ve understood, the recent drama was mostly about an immature creator rather than rampant AI generated code.
Grimmory looks sweet, but with the recent drama and the apparent opt-out (but not really) telemetry, the massive amount of AI-generated code etc. I will want to let the age a little before I install that on my server.
That’s fair. The community seems to be much more sane than the original dev and is working hard to clean it up. The first release already removed the telemetry and the obnoxious donation button.
Just today I tried switching from Calibre on my Desktop to calibre-web-automated. But after about an hour of fiddling and searching, I went back to calibre on my PC.
I couldn’t get KOreader on my kindle to simply sync books that I add to my library to my ereader wirelessly.
The best I could manage is use KOreader to subscribe to CWAs OPDS feed, but that doesn’t automatically add new books, I would have to manually go to the OPDS feed and download the books. And apparently, kosync is only able to sync reading progress.
With Calibre on. My desktop, I simply start the program on my PC, enable WiFi in Koreader and new books get automatically downloaded.
I kind of railroaded myself into using calibre unfortunately.
I have a very specific filenaming scheme which I originally came up with back when I only used folders for organising my books in order to group together books that belong to a series but where the series is part of a larger universe.
Basically my folder structure is {World}/{Reading Order}; {Series} #{Series_Index} - {Title} - {Author}
On my kobo I have the autoshelf plugin installed which automatically parses this information when I add books and groups them together by world while filling out the series information.
In order to properly make use of this system I need to use Calibre custom columns and be able to export the books I want with this specific name format. I have yet to find a program other than calibre that would support this.
It would probably be smarter for me to reorganize my books at some point but I really like being able to basically drop a ton of books at once onto my reader using SFTP and as far as I can tell all common options rely on manually downloading the books, sending them directly to the reader or pulling them from their internal file storage in whatever form the application stores them…
I do like Audiobookshelf for the ability to add a book to multiple series, but the missing mass export functions stop me from switching
Bunch of folders by general theme.
