What does HackerNews think of calibre-web?

:books: Web app for browsing, reading and downloading eBooks stored in a Calibre database

Language: Python

I just like having the entire collection of files in one place, some of them are textbooks or reference books that don't sit well in either app entirely, and while I also keep novels there in a separate subcollection, most of my ebooks are non-fiction, where topics are the same or related to the rest of material I already keep in Zotero.

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

I pretty much have to use it for some things, but as sibling commenters have pointed out, there are some serious flaws with both it and its maintainer. I've mostly moved to using [Calibre Web](https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) which is a software intended as a companion, but I use it almost exclusively.

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.

Full text search sounds great. I'm just wondering what kind of overhead it will add to a big library? I think I have about 3000+ books in mine.

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!

Seems that with calibre-web[1] we can have nice web front-end. But it doesn't have full-text search inside the content of the books though, unlike google books.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

If you want to go a step further, calibre-web[1] can act as a backend replacement for kobos servers (and proxy to kobo) so whenever I sync my kobo, it gets any new books from my calibre library over wifi.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I recently started self hosting calibre-web[0] which consumes a calibre database and provides a basic web interface for viewing and uploading books to it. The killer feature for me is that it can act as a Kobo sync server. It makes getting my entire library onto my e-reader a breeze.

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

I prefer calibre-web[1] and it is under active development.

[1]:https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I use a Kobo Libra H2O which has been quite good to me. For people that want to take it to the next level, there's the calibre-web project[1]. It's able to tie into calibre and push books to kobo devices through the built-in sync command.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

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

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 run a calibre-web docker instance on aws.

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.

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

I‘m using calibre with calibre-web [1] to browse my 80000+ pdfs and couldn‘t be happier with the workflow. Only downside: import of these pdfs took almost a whole day.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

FBReader is available for windows, if you're looking for open source (keeping in mind that the Android version is no longer open source, so it's not the same FBReader). CoolReader is also available for windows.

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

[0]: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I run it on a server and use calibre-web as a frontend. Has a nice UI and works well for my purposes:

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

Check out Calibre-Web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/). I'm only mentioning it because you've mentioned Plex, because it comes with a theme that's a clone of Plex: https://github.com/leram84/layer.Cake/tree/master/caliBlur
I don't think so, but there is inbuilt calibre-server which should suffice for most of your needs and apparently it was improved in last version. There is also calibre-web[0] project. And on Calibre's wikipedia page it lists quite a few Calibre related applications which could do what you want.

[0]: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

Check out Calibre-Web[1], It runs on top of a calibre database and some other calibre tooling, you can upload and download books from it, edit meta-data, read through the browser. Any books I grab I upload to it (can do via phone easily enough) and then I point my Kobo to it to grab books. I run it on a headless server, and never interact with Calibre UI.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I've been using Calibre-Web[1] as a frontend for the Calibre database, visiting it with my Kobo Auro H2O.

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.

[1] https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

I wrote an article about this exact question: https://blog.ivansmirnov.name/what-can-you-do-with-a-persona...

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://concourse-ci.org/

- 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