Plex for books?

frazorth@feddit.uk to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 95 points –

I've picked up an eink Android tablet, which is awesome. However I have plenty of ebooks I've purchased over the years on places such as Humble, and I was wondering whether there was a self hosted solution like Plex/Emby/Jellyfin but designed for ebooks.

I've seen Calibre but it doesn't seem to be quite the same thing, and running a sync is a bit clunky for the spouse factor.

Is there anything that would index the books, show a bookshelf and allow me to read them, with offline support?

Preferably with an Android app for reading with, and the reader handling eink rather than scrolling.

48

What about Calibre databse but Calibre-web for a daily use?

https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

This.

We each have an account. Login to the web interface. Choose the desired book. Click send. The epub is emailed to our Kindle.

Running calibre-web off a docker instance. Library is on my NAS.

I use the Window client to add books, handle conversions, and manage things since I have specialized plugins. You can read via the web app as well, but I prefer my ancient Paperwhite.

The epub is emailed to our Kindle.

Amazon have been making this harder and harder. Originally you could define an allowlist of senders, and any emails from those senders would go to the Kindle. Then they changed it so you have to click a link in an email to approve it. Now, you have to go to Amazon, find the Kindle content page (which is well hidden), and click a button to approve it.

If you know a workaround for that then I'd love to hear it.

I vaguely remember what you're referring to and being pretty frustrated about it. I can't remember exactly what changed regarding clicking an emailed link. I simply don't experience that any longer. Either Amazon stopped or I changed some setting somewhere that I'm not recalling off hand... 😬

Currently, I have calibre-web (and the windows client) set to use my email's SMTP credentials. I then set the "sender" to an Amazon approved email. In my case, the email isn't actually real. I just use a forwarder.

Make sure you add that sender email to the Amazon personal document approved email list.

The most recent bump I've had with Amazon is that they no longer accept mobi files. It's no big deal though since they accept epubs without an issue.

Jellyfin has ebook support and allows you to download them for offline reading, which I reccommend because the ebook viewer is very basic

I can confirm and I do use this feature of jellyfin. It works great. The reader is unusable. I use Librera for reading. It's great, free, and open source.

So my flow is biblio, mam, library Genesis, Anna's. Then to jellyfin folder that it reads automatically. Then I can download that to any device connected to the jellyfin server. Local is easy, abroad through tailscale.

I think kavita works fairly well. It doesn't have an app, but it comes with a built-in OPDS server, so you can just plug the link into any app that supports it and access all your book. For eink devices I recommend koreader. For other devices you may prefer an app with a less confusing UI, but that's a matter of preference. Alternatively the kavita webclient has a reader as well.

Jellyfin can do books with a plugin

The reader itself leaves a lot to be desired though. There's literally no UI besides the arrow keys and no way to configure font rendering etc. It's cool that the functionality is there, but it needs work.

I'm a JF developer and personally use Kavita for my books 🤣

On android there is a client for it, called Jellybook, but I have never used it. Maybe that has better UI than the official app.

Calibre does all the management and conversion/reading/other but you have to do the initial work of cataloging them.

Afaik it won’t download covers. Maybe it does now, idk.

I wasn't aware of a good reader app, and it required me to use the web view. Unless there is one that I missed?

I run calibre off my desktop. You can enable the Calibre content server and it can serve up your books for download (or provide a web reader).

If you have an Android device, you can use something like Moon Reader (or any other reading app that supports epub or Pdf) to download content from the Calibre content server.

With respect to covers and metadata, Calibre can tag and fill in this info as well - out of the box it will scrape information from Amazon.

I've been looking for something like this for a while. Calibre is great for managing it on a personal machine, but I want something that I can use on the web and then, with a click, send a book to a Kindle or whatever.

Koreader has a plugin to sync with calibre local server and its a REALLY good ereader software

You're probably looking for something that supports OPDS to automatically download e-books to your e-reader.

First search result is Komga

The calibre content server also serves OPDS. Once you have a OPDS server in place you'll need to point a capable reader at it, but after that syncing and reading happens in the reader.

❤️

Thank you. Half the battle is learning the correct terminology!

Calibre-web supports OPDS and uses the Calibre database.

Syncthing and KoReader. I also have a few android eink devices and this system works great for me. When I need a better interface for organizing/editing metadata of files I use calibre which also has some plugins to help free your files from proprietary epub readers.

  • Kavita

  • Komga

  • Calibre-web

  • Audiobookshelf with ePub plugin

Those are the main ones I know about. I only use Kavita and I like it, but it's not perfect so you should try them all.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
NAS Network-Attached Storage
Plex Brand of media server package
SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #496 for this sub, first seen 8th Feb 2024, 18:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Audiobookshelf claims to have ebook support. I only use it for audio books so I cannot say whether it's good for that or not.

It works great for the audio books.

Support for ebooks is honestly pretty good. The reader is mid tier at best but it'll only get better, hopefully.

I use it for digital books and it works great. You can configure it to send a book to an email so it appears automatically. The auto tagging works well too.

I've been looking for something for my RPG pdf collection and haven't really found anything that scratches every need I have for it yet. I've gone through most of what's out there and didn't really see many great options. I mostly want to organize/categorize my collection of ttrpg e-books (reading I can do through dropbox as I don't really jump from one item to another often enough to justify syncing my entire 100k+ collection), so I just settled on Zotero. It's mainly meant for journals and scholarly works, but it seems like it fits part of my use-case and it's tagging features are decent enough. Syncing PDFs is an option, but I'd have to get into the paid tier to have my whole collection accounted for.

Jellyfin I guess does have support for ebooks through a plug-in, but it isn't terribly great IMO and you'll still need something else like Tailscale I believe to actually be able to view stuff outside of your home wifi network. There's some other options out there I believe, though they all seemed to be geared towards Manga collections, so if you're looking to organize through this system, those may not work as well either (and you still may need Tailscale regardless).

So not a solution you’re asking for but the remarkable e-ink tablet has a great set of apps for mobile devices and computers. It hosts your books in the cloud so you’ll always have access to stuff anywhere with internet. Automatically syncs across devices. Pretty slick.

Yeah. An eInk device that can run an Android file browser and just grab eBook files off the local network is a fantastic solution.

So just using Calibre to sync your books is kind of a pain in the ass, I agree. Especially with multiple users. However! Sync isn't the only way of getting books on your devices.

You can set up a locally browsable OPDS catalog for you to download your books from. There should be a bunch of "Calibre server" options in your sharing settings in Calibre, that's what you'll need. You can access it from the web browser or your reader's built-in OPDS browser (most android ebook readers that aren't dedicated app store portals have one).

That being said you can also install the calibre-web package to your homelab, which hosts the library database and the OPDS server standalone. With that setup you'd only need to use the Calibre app to manage or add books your remote library, either directly or syncing the library database file.

Both of these methods are okay if you want to curate the books on your devices, but if you're like me and want all the books everywhere sync is ideal. For that I use the Reading List Calibre extension, which lets you create multiple reading lists for multiple devices that are populated with a library search (i.e. "date:<=45daysago" will search for books added to Calibre within the last 45 days) and automatically sync up on device connection.

I have an Onyx Boox tablet and use ubooquity as an ebook OPDS server on my unraid box at home, it has an online reader that's pretty good, but I just download the ebook file to local storage and use the much better reader built into the system. I'm a slow reader so I dont have to do it often.

I haven't really found a third party reader that is e-ink optimised and can seamlessly integrate an OPDS server. I'd like to find one, particularly if it has syncing between devices as I also use a foldy phone as my main device so it seems some use as a reader sometimes.

I also self host a huge archive of manga in Komga, and access that on the tablet and phone via a tachiyomi fork, it handles e-ink optimisation pretty well. It also doesn't sync between devices but if I use the komga web reader it does, it's just a bit power hungry on the Boox and has no offline functionality so I just manually keep in sync which isn't that hard.

Same, have a boox, getting a second boox, and really wish I had a better option to track location across devices. KOReader is a nice reader experience, but browsing books sucks. I use a blend of moon reader and the built in app depending on my mood, but neither feels as good as maple reader on my iPad, and nothing I've found can really sync my location.

I know you said "self hosted", but if you are interested in an Android app, Google Play Books does most of what you want, I think. You can upload your books, and read them on any device (with offline capabilities). But this is the Self Hosted community, so I will show myself out.

How well does that work on eink displays? I guess I'll have to try it, but the Kindle app always tries to add animation on Android.

On kindle, if you tap the middle of the screen, then click the little Aa up top, you get formatting options. On reflowable formats, you can go to the more tab and uncheck the animation button. On ones that are fixed pages, it should be one of the only options.