According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:
Announcement
📢 A note on where things stand
ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.
That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That’s the whole point of open source.
So here’s what’s happening next:
A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you’ve been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.
We’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from everything this community has already built together.
If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: 👉 https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk
More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That’s exactly why it’s worth continuing.
The only lesson to be learned from this is disclosure. If AI is so good/bad don’t hide the fact that you are using it. End of story. Let people make their decisions based off that.
Oh goddamn it, I deployed this like five days ago. Been working on digitizing my whole collection for the past week cuz I liked it so much. Fuck lol.
Uh, anyone know any good alternatives???
On my server I have Calibre Web Automated, Komga, and Kavita setup. I started with CWA for epubs and it’s been pretty great especially for syncing metadata that, with the recent update, has gotten better. The downside I’ve had is with comics. It supports them but there’s currently no support for writing metadata for .cbr or .cbz so trying to sync or update metadata errors out. Sometimes it saves it, but a lot of the time it errors out for me. Which is why I spun up Komga and Kavita. They’re both good for comics, manga, and books. Plus the UI on both is nice. However, they both don’t sync metadata as well as CWA. I think there’s another container you can create to write metadata for Komga and Kavita, but I had no luck with it. Eventually I’ll decide on just one, but so far, I’m undecided on which one I like the most.
I’ve been using Calibre (not the web version tho) to fetch metadata and better covers and create .opf files before I upload to my server anyway. Kavita’s documentation says it will import metadata from an opf in the same folder, so it should work out of the box, yes?
Honestly Calibre has a LOT of features that I don’t ever use, which is why I wasn’t planning on running CWA. I don’t have any comics, but between Komga and Kavita, which would you say is better for books (most of mine are epub format)?
First off, I started self hosting about a year or so ago so I’m not an expert. However, I decided to migrate a couple of my books from CWA to both Komga and Kavita so I could compare and reply to you. That led me down a rabbit hole of error messages and I was ready to tell you to just use CWA. But it was user error due to corrupted files lol. After getting that sorted, I’ve come to the conclution that Komga and Kavita are nearly identical. The only difference I could see is, IMO, Kavita is prettier. But they both manage their files roughly the same and if you have the metadata in a .opf inside the same folder as the epub both will pull the metadata with no additional config needed. TBH, Kavita looks better to me. However, Komga has a better web reader IMO. Sometimes with Kavitas web reader I have to change the view settings to scroll rather than columns because it bugs and doesn’t continue to the next page. Whereas I haven’t had that issue with Komga. If you just want a virtural library to download your books off of, then I would recommend Kavita because of it’s UI. However, if you’re planning on mostly using the web reader, I would recommend Komga. Hopefully that was helpful.
What’s the work flow life for CWA? I currently use calibre-web (kobosync) and calibre to organize and polish then drag and drop the epubs to calibre-web. There has to be a better way lol
I’ve never used Calibre-web so I wouldn’t know the difference but Calibre Web Automated is supposed to be a blend of Calibre and Calibre-Web. I don’t run a calibre server at home anymore because it wasn’t needed after implementing CWA. I did have to copy some Calibre files to run the CWA container (it’s in the setup doc) but I haven’t needed Calibre since setting up CWA. Whenever I get more books I move the files to the “booksync” folder and it uploads it to CWA. You can also upload them via the webpage. The downside, I usually have to manually fetch the metadata for the books. But that’s not a big deal to me. At least I can do everything in one place. I think CWA supports CW plugins, but I’m not 100% certain. I would recommend it if you’re looking for one place to hold and update your books metadata.
Have you read the post? Just wait for the new repo
Yes, friend, I read the post. But frankly I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, particularly considering how shit went down with Booklore.
I joined the new discord, and will make a donation once there’s a means to do so, but I’m not sure how long it will take them to get something up and running. The original dev also joined their discord and immediately started talking shit to everyone in there, so that was interesting. And the mods there also asked for logo ideas, and it pretty quickly devolved into an AI slop fest, which was disappointing. So. We’ll see how it goes.
That’s fair. An unfortunate situation.
Well, that went downhill very fast. Very sad. I liked the UI too; it was a good way to manage a collection; and it synced with my Kobo pretty easily.
I hope those who have the ability to do so will create something from its ashes.
I think CWA is the one to watch. It’s progress has been slower but steady.
i started using CWA and it has been fantastic. it was the best project for my purposes among the ones i tried (calibre-web, kavita, booklore). Booklore was pretty but not really stable imo
I’ve tried CWA in the past but, for some reason (probably my own fault!), I could never get the Kobo Sync function to work. Maybe I’ll give it another go.
As a stopgap for now, I have all my ebooks in Audiobookshelf. There’s no sync function, but I’m used to the UI because I already use and like it for audiobooks and podcasts.
They seem to be working on uh, syncing all the sync features. There have been some updates recently.
I liked the UI too
It looked like a very solid UI. In fact, so much so that I’ve toyed with the idea of deploying it.
Yep, I saw the writing on the wall and tagged my 1.13.2 image locally. It’s still running fine on my machine and I added his animated donate button to my filter lists on ublock. I’m going to have to backup this image and keep using it until it breaks. Hopefully by then someone has a fork.
Oh well guess I’ll continue using audiobookshelf.
Good riddance.
Has anyone used Komga as an alternative? It’s primarily for manga and comics but it seems to support books too (epub and PDF). It also seems to be able to sync books with Kobo devices.
I will say, even given all the drama around the original creator in the last few weeks, Booklore has a solid front end experience, is quite flexible, and generally stable app. It’s a bummer the creator acted childishly (again and again), but I know I’ll be looking to use whatever the v2 of this becomes.
I set up Komga as soon as the original reddit thread went up about the Booklore dev. Works great, pretty simple, does what it needs to do, and setting up Kobo sync for my wife took all of 5 minutes.
I just switched to Komga, the only thing I’m missing is the easy way to search for metadata, but I don’t mind that part. Komga works perfectly fine for normal books in my short testing.
The handling of books is a bit weird, because for single books it creates a “Series” with only one entry.
I don’t directly sync to my Kobo reader, but instead use KOReader and access Komga via OPDS. The progress sync from KOReader to Komga works too (just don’t use special characters in your password)
Yep, works great. If you need help setting it up, reach out.
Shame, it was a great project. Guess I’ll be migrating to calibre-web automated.
Long live BookLore!
Crazy. It had a meteoric rise.
I guess CWA is the one to use now. In a way I’m glad the space will have only a single major player.
