How are you hosting your ebooks?

falcon15500 , 5 months ago

I am using Calibre-Web mostly - but I have run into issues with thumbnail generation after my collection hit around 500000 books. I am just over 600000 now, but a large swathe don't have thumbnails unless I do a manual metadata search. I should probably look for an alternative, but at this point I CBF.

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Over half a million books? I'm so envious!

Mycatiskai , 5 months ago

Calibre for my Kobo, Librera FD on my phone.

bitwolf , 5 months ago

I tried Kavita but it didn't have the features I needed.
I ended up just throwing them on Nextcloud and using Nextcloud sync onto my reader (Box Air 3c)

sabreW4K3 OP , 4 months ago

What features did you need?

keyez , 5 months ago

I use Kavita and KavitaEmail to organize and have a frontend for my books, and the latter to email them to my kindle if it's not on there yet. My kavita container is stopped most of the time because I already know what I'm going to read next and just need it up to sync or send new books.

Used to just have my library I exported from Amazon and ebooks com on a single folder on my NAS, kavita helped clean it up a bit.

I also tried audiobookshelf but mostly for audiobooks and podcasts and didnt quite fit my workflow I already had and liked using kavita and Antennapod.

lud , 5 months ago

Honest question. Why host them? Finishing one book can take a while and they are incredibly small.

I just use calibre and sync with my e reader and phone occasionally.

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Because I have a really cool library and it should all be kept in a centralised place

tenebrisnox , 5 months ago

I do the same thing. I’ve tried Kavita and Audiobookshelf and ended up just keeping the books on a network share and then accessing them through Calibre. I am sideloading to a Kindle though.

jjakc , 5 months ago

You can use calibre-web to send to your Kindle email. They will appear in the Kindle as "Documents"

zeekaran , 5 months ago

Download whenever I feel like it. Share them.

LynneOfFlowers , 5 months ago

For me (I use Kavita) it’s because I want to be able to just pick up whatever device is in front of me at the moment and pick up the book where I last left off even if it was on another device

lud , 5 months ago

Syncing progress seems like a very good reason for hosting. I didn't think of that.

Thanks!

thechadwick , 5 months ago

Academics focused, but Zotero indexing a large cloud storage drive.

Let's things organized by subject, tag, author, title, or whatever else I want. Also keeps my notes all in one place. Huge huge proponent and it's open source!

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Never heard of Zotero before, it seems to be quite capable

thechadwick , 5 months ago

The best thing is adding the metadata of a book by ISBN. That or simply search it on worldcat.org and adding by the browser extension.

Phenomenal citations manager.

rockhandle , 5 months ago

Jellyfin lol

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Why lol? The library interface is great and it can manage multiple users. I haven't used it for book hosting, but I am trying to keep an eye out

rockhandle , 5 months ago

I know, it's just the fact that I use it for pretty much all of my media that I find kinda funny. Goes to show, it's really an amazing program tho.

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Yep, Jellyfin is super underrated.

lemming741 , 5 months ago

https://www.audiobookshelf.org/

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Does it work for ePUBs too or just audio books?

lemming741 , 5 months ago

Yup. It's got built in browser based text reader and an audio player.

FYI, readarr needs separate instances for audio and text. Wasn't worth the hassle for me

JVT038 , 5 months ago

I'm using Calibre-Web

nis , 5 months ago

Same here. My Kobo Libre 2 syncs with it over Wifi. It's nice.

pezhore , 5 months ago

This is the right answer. I have dockerized Calibre and Calibre-Web for initial intake, then use Calibre-Web's OPDS feed with my Moon+ Android app for reading on my tablet/phone.

Calibre handles type conversions, metadata sync, and file organization.

Calibre-Web works well for browser reading on my PC.

jozza , 5 months ago

I'm just here to lurk and see what others say, as I've used Calibre in the past and it didn't really do the job I was hoping it would.

Scrath , 5 months ago

Same. My organization scheme heavily relies on calibres custom columns and export schemas though so it would be hard for me to switch anyway.

The only 2 things I dislike about calibre are the lack of a server based version and the inability to assign a book to multiple series

sabreW4K3 OP , 5 months ago

Yeah, I just want something that looks good, can link works by authors and shared universes and can sync reading progress across devices.