EBook Management

lenuup@reddthat.com to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 66 points –

I am setting up a new server for my media and wanted to ask for your best ways to manage an ebook and comic collection. I have been using calibre so far, but it is not really designed to be managed remotely.

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I've just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you'd expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I'm only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

I don't think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it's a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

It's been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I'm already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn't like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I'd use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn't spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.

i use calibre on desktop to clean uip library like you. After any updates i sync it to a dir on my nas that calibre web uses. its a really good setup and passes the wife test

Thanks - I thought it would be something like this I just hadn't made the effort. Calibre-web just runs as a server?

Yup. Has an easy docker setup. Also if you have a kobo you can sync your shelfs wirelessly. Love it