What does HackerNews think of calibre-web?
:books: Web app for browsing, reading and downloading eBooks stored in a Calibre database
Some are non-academic PDFs, blueprints, guides, whitepapers or manuals that I refer to for a given project, and while this is not the main purpose of Zotero, as it is a research-oriented tool, it still proves more useful than other tools, tidier than classical folders+files, and less of a hassle than coming up with my own system using something like Obsidian's dataview plugin.
Calibre I prefer it to fix the metadata of my ebooks, but the local reading story isn't ideal for me. I've tried serving the collection over self-hosted web apps, to keep the page progress like calibre-web, but it wasn't ideal for me or conducive to what I look for: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
It has a web interface, and you can deploy it using a container. The killer feature for me that Calibre itself lacks is that has over the internet syncing with the native Kobo firmware. You essentially trick the Kobo into thinking it's calling home to get ebooks from their servers, but you're accessing your own instance of Calibre-web.
This makes my workflow of adding a new ebook as simple as uploading it to my hosted instance of calibre-web, and then next time I pick up my kobo it will automatically download it.
Calibre is one of those excellent pieces of software that shows free and open source can sometimes be better than commercial software. My only gripe with it is that it is updated so often [sometimes it seems almost weekly] and every update involves visiting the site and downloading the whole app again. In-place auto-updates would be nice.
I use Calibre along with Calibre-Web [0] to make my library available online, so I can always grab one of my books to read on my phone, whenever I'm stuck somewhere, thumb-twiddling. I have an rsync... command aliased in my terminal. So every time I add new books to Calibre on desktop, I just type that in a terminal and it's immediately synced to my online library.
[0] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
PS: Top marks also to Calibre Dev for actually spelling the name of the app properly. It gladdens my heart no end to see the occasional piece of proper English flotsam still afloat on the massive tide of online Americanisms.
UPDATE: Dammit! --just downloaded and Calibre 6 is OSX 10,15+ only. Another piece of software leaves me languishing, as I stick with Mojave. On the plus side, I'll no longer have to worry about the huge updates I was complaining about above!
It doesn't do all that calibre does obviously but it does most of what I need. It's not per see a fork as it only uses the same database formats and directly call calibre for conversion but it's as close as you get to a "modern" gui on top of calibre.
As usual, the people actually doing the work and the people complaining are strictly different subsets.
I can just upload any ebook file and in a second it's available for my family and friends. One click and it imports the necessary metadata from amazon books.
Custom shelves allows for collaboration or sharing of collections of books.
It's a great web adoption of calibre.
I hope Calibre 5.0 gets merged into it soon.
Personally, I actually prefer calibre's ebook reader; if you dislike it, but do use a Calibre library, Calibre Web [0] has a (IMO) fairly decent browser-based ebook reader
It will do neat things like convert to Kindle & email to the Kindle address with a button press as well so I can give access to my mum and so she can seamlessly read the epub books I have in my library on her Kindle.
It doesn't look great on the Kobo, but I can navigate pretty quickly to download a book, and I hardly ever have to touch calibre itself.
It's pretty easy to get set up running headlessly on a server somwhere.
Some new tech that hasn't made it on the list yet:
- https://github.com/issmirnov/zap - recursive URL expander, can be run at DNS level. Ie, "n/" -> "https://news.ycombinator.com/" or "f/g/homelab" -> facebook.com/groups/homelab
- netdata
- https://varnish-cache.org/intro/
- AFP/NFS/samba for file sharing
- https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web - web UI for calibre ebooks
- https://jupyter.org/ for python scripts and web scraping
- https://github.com/cdr/code-server for an IDE in a tab.
- https://www.portainer.io/ if you use docker
- https://yourls.org/ for a private URL shortener in your home