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.
What about Calibre databse but Calibre-web for a daily use?
This.
We each have an account. Login to the web interface. Choose the desired book. Click send. The epub is emailed to our Kindle.
Running calibre-web off a docker instance. Library is on my NAS.
I use the Window client to add books, handle conversions, and manage things since I have specialized plugins. You can read via the web app as well, but I prefer my ancient Paperwhite.
Jellyfin has ebook support and allows you to download them for offline reading, which I reccommend because the ebook viewer is very basic
I can confirm and I do use this feature of jellyfin. It works great. The reader is unusable. I use Librera for reading. It’s great, free, and open source.
So my flow is biblio, mam, library Genesis, Anna’s. Then to jellyfin folder that it reads automatically. Then I can download that to any device connected to the jellyfin server. Local is easy, abroad through tailscale.
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.
Calibre
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.
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.
I’m a JF developer and personally use Kavita for my books 🤣
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.
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
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I’ve used Ubooquity on and off for this. It has some nice features, but isn’t open source.
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).
I have an Onyx Boox tablet and use ubooquity as an ebook OPDS server on my unraid box at home, it has an online reader that’s pretty good, but I just download the ebook file to local storage and use the much better reader built into the system. I’m a slow reader so I dont have to do it often.
I haven’t really found a third party reader that is e-ink optimised and can seamlessly integrate an OPDS server. I’d like to find one, particularly if it has syncing between devices as I also use a foldy phone as my main device so it seems some use as a reader sometimes.
I also self host a huge archive of manga in Komga, and access that on the tablet and phone via a tachiyomi fork, it handles e-ink optimisation pretty well. It also doesn’t sync between devices but if I use the komga web reader it does, it’s just a bit power hungry on the Boox and has no offline functionality so I just manually keep in sync which isn’t that hard.
Same, have a boox, getting a second boox, and really wish I had a better option to track location across devices. KOReader is a nice reader experience, but browsing books sucks. I use a blend of moon reader and the built in app depending on my mood, but neither feels as good as maple reader on my iPad, and nothing I’ve found can really sync my location.
