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.
Jellyfin has ebook support and allows you to download them for offline reading, which I reccommend because the ebook viewer is very basic
I’ll give it a go. Thanks!
AudiobookShelf does more than audiobooks. You can do epubs, etc.
I shill audiobookshelf every chance I get.
https://wiki.kavitareader.com/en/faq/external-readers
I keep not getting to it, so can’t vouch for it, but Kavita looks like it’s worth trying.
I use Kavita. I have some minor complaints but in general it works.
I haven’t tried others though, so can’t say if it’s the best or not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Calibre Content Server
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.htmlOr Calibre-Web
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-webYeah, based on OP saying low WAF, I’m guessing maybe he didn’t set up the content server? Ours is great, and I can read on my phone or 2-in-1.
Koreader has a plugin to sync with calibre local server and its a REALLY good ereader software
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.
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Good bot
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.
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Why not just use files?
Because unfortunately that wouldn’t pass the spouse test.
I mean she could, until she is bored.
Plus this is hopefully a self hosted community, so understands that I don’t mind doing a bit of legwork up front to gain an ease of use later down the line.
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).
