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Calibre Web?
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Calibre is basically the standard at the moment. I personally find it very frustrating and a perfect example of giving the user too much control. There are so many tweaks that it is nearly impossible to set up the same way twice. And some settings are super buried. I count at least three settings panes that are completely separate.
I am all for power-users, etc but there is a line where it is just too much!
What's worse is that the developer is quite opinionated on how things should work. The best example in my mind is that the default is to store your last read position in the epub. While I see the benefit, it means that any syncing program now has to sync the entire file every time it is viewed. That is problematic for things like cookbooks which are (a) big and (b) usually read non-sequentially. You can, of course, change it but that settings is buried in the settings for the reader.
With that said, I use the app since it has features I just haven't found elsewhere. And it is super powerful!
Calibre-web is also really nice and polished but lacks a feature I really want! When you open an epub in the web-viewer, it downloads the entire epub into your browser. Again, this is miserable for large books like a cookbook. See #1647. (epubs are zip-based but there are ample server-side tools that can read into the file).
It depends on the service you're using. Authelia can be set up to provide a header to your proxy that includes the logged in username. If your service supports it, you can then request that header to track your user.
If it's supported, your service (for instance calibre-web, which supports it), will ignore the need for a password, assuming the username header is provided.
Just make sure that you are only allowing users to access the page through your reverse proxy, and when authenticated, since otherwise they could conceivably just forge those request headers.
I’ve had good luck using Calibre-Web. I run it in a docker container and point it at my calibre data. Once it’s installed and configured there is a nice web interface to browse the books and you can email them to your kindle account for free. Then on every kindle app I login to I have my books and the place is synced.
Here is the github page: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
It's listed under dockerhub here: technosoft2000/calibre-web
I use it with unraid and it gives a much nicer interface than cops or ubooquity.
Calibre-web is different from Calibre in that it is a web app that uses Calibre database to present, read, download books through a web interface.
In the process of consolidating all my docker-compose files, will post a link tomorrow!
It may just be an simple matter of updating your plugins.
Going over some basics:
By new upgrade you mean the Firmware 4.25.15875 release?
By syncing with Calibre do you mean the using the calibre-web integration or plug into your kobo and syncing via Calibre?
This fixed it for me. I had to open the console to the container and edit the init file they mention in the issue thread. There was no text editor installed so you may want to install vim or nano as well.
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/1466#issuecomment-639050762
If you have a Kobo, Calibre-Web's Kobo Integration is trivial to set up, and a give you access to all of your calibre library, works with the built in library management, and does position syncing back to calibre.
Step 2: Download the calibre-web-master.zip from https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web.
Extract the folder and rename it Calibre-Web and place the folder directly into your C drive (e.g. C:\Calibre-Web )
I use Calibre-web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web) , which is a self hosted online calibre library with good features including reader, it can be integrated with nextcloud with the external sites app However their is no sync between nextcloud files and the library, everything need to be importer in the calibre web app
The real solution is to not use the file system at all. I use Calibre-web there same way I'd use Plex and it's much easier than going through the filesystem.
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
This is what I use. It let's you read right in browser, and even has one click send to kindle devices/apps. It's the best way I've found to remotely share my calibre library.
>> If you run the regular calibre application, is it running calibre-server in the background? Or does calibre-server run only when you run calibre-web? > >You mean this calibre-web? https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web > >That's a separate application, and I would advise you to not run calibre and calibre-web on the same library at the same time if both have write access. Calibre is not designed for multi-user access, and something will break eventually. > >Yes Calibre-web works. As long as you don't run it simultaneously with Calibre, everything should be fine. >
Calibre server is the inbuilt web server, not a separate app.
OP,
You can run calibre server automatically on calibre start, but you'll need to enable it in the preferences within calibre to do so.
You can also run calibre server without having calibre open (as a scheduled task), but as the poster above mentioned, there is a possibility of library corruption if you use it and calibre at the same time.
This is for all ereaders including Kindle. I have a Kindle.
It allows you to buy a book from Kobo instead of Amazon, download it, and then put it on your kindle using either https://calibre-ebook.com/ or https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web.
I download a book, use the 'Send to Calibre Web' button in kobodl, then use the 'Send to Kindle' button in Calibre Web.
The poster is asking about Calibre-Web, you are talking about calibre-server. Two different (but related) pieces of software.
Hi for now, calisuck doesn't support Calibre Web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web).
Only the original calibre server because it provides an API. It's on my roadmap as it is for opendirectories with .opf files.
Sorry for that
I don't need calibre running for the web interface. It's a project on GitHub not the inbuilt webserver. It provides a pretty slick interface as well.
But I can kind off see where this fits in, much more control over the process if you know what you're doing, which I don't!
In addition to Calibre, I recommend Calibre-web as a web UI for your library: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
I currently have about 3k books and comics in mine and it's great. It even has a web reader for some formats (I personally contributed to improving the comic book reader on git).
Calibre-Web is a python web server with user auth and other nice features. There's even a docker container for a raspberry pi.
I have a VPS in Digital Ocean using nginx with let's encrypt as reverse proxy for these apps:
- Calibre Web Browser based ebook reader/manager
- TranslateJPBot Telegram bot that I wrote in haskell for looking up words in a Japanese to English dictionary.
No, just wondering. The default Calibre web server is fine for serving ebooks. I found this cool library https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web that also allows you to add books/manage metadata from the web, which is really nice if you're running it in a headless server.
You should be fine sharing your library with family/friends.
I'm using calibre-web as my web interface. It lets me manage my content from the Calibre software, but not have to use it's clunky Web-UI when I want to read something in a browser. The bookmark syncing in the browser seems to be iffy at best, but you can use it as a opds server with various apps that support it for easier mobile viewing.
It seems like the best solution is some combination of Calibre for managment, Nextcloud/Seafile for storage and syncing, and using apps that support progress syncing. I haven't really found that happy point yet.
Official doc's are here. I used this guide to get it up and running on my kobo Clara HD. After first enabling it
I've recently installed this,
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
The UI is better, but there are some limitations, such as you can't delete books (you can archive them), and I haven't figured out book covers yet. My solution is I run both.
Yes, it seems to be available on mac.
If you dont plan to use calibre for anything else, just use kepubify.
I'm using kepubify with calibre-web and kobo integration.
I realise it was old, but I am sure you know how much outdate or unaswered is out there on the interwebs!
This is pretty great and simple to use too. Multi-user etc. Currently in place
Calibre-web
> When you download a book from the Kobo or Kindle stores to your desktop, they don't download with the proper name or title.
I use https://github.com/subdavis/kobo-book-downloader, and they work properly when you use that.
And yes, keeping the calibre library including the metadata.db file is the way to go. Once they're in calibre, the original files aren't much use.
> I want to keep a copy of each book on my computer that's separate from my Calibre library, in case Calibre crashes.
You don't need to. Just keep the calibre library folder. All your books are in there, probably in multiple formats. If you want a "backup" just make a zip of the calibre library folder every once in a while.
> What file name format do you use and why? (Author- title? Title- author?) Is the original format better quality? Saving these would mean my collection tags wouldn't be attached, right?
Just let calibre deal with it.
As a bonus round, I really don't use calibre much anymore except to hack around with books. My main library is kept in Calibre-Web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web which is a whole different application that accepts a calibre library folder and database file and turns it into a proper web application.
Credit goes to https://github.com/Ramblurr
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/issues/1466
​
Workaround
If you are using the linuxserver/calibre-web docker image then here is a workaround:
Create a directory named custom-cont-init.d inside the /config mount point (so /config/custom-cont-init.d on the host)
Create a file named: patch-session-protection.sh in that directory
Add the contents
#!/bin/bash
echo "**** patching calibre-web - removing session protection ****"
sed -i "/lm.session_protection = 'strong'/d" /app/calibre-web/cps/__init__.py
Restart your container
A solution I've been working through slowly is to use a project called calibre-web -- Calibre-web is intended to be a web-based version of the desktop calibre app which is for ebooks, but someone added support for single-file audiobooks to it which is *awesome*.
Unfortunately I still haven't figure out a way to download from that into an ebook player on my iphone; seems like if someone made an audiobook player which could read OPDS catalogs and download audiobooks from them that would be about the perfect solution =] But, we'll see...
I appreciate the other ideas mentioned here, I've played with using Plex as well and it's a decent option, except it's hard to organize books well if you have a lot of them.
Hey man, thanks for starting this, as a consumer of both comics and manga I've been looking for something like this forever!
- Right now I use Calibre-Web but after reading through this thread I might be switching to Kavita.
- Integration with the original Calibre would be helpful
- Generally Author/Series/Volume/Issue
- Interface reminds me of Lidarr which I have no issues with
- I do a lot of reading on my Kindle as well, it would be interesting to have Comicarr send new issues to my Kindle on release.
I'm not much of a developer but I'd like to contribute where I can. You mentioned you might need some help in the hosting department, I have a pretty good background in web hosting so any way I can help please let me know!
> these require open source reader software like KOReader or Plato which run alongside the default reader software
Alternatively, setup Calibre-Web. In addition to giving you a full featured web interface with multi-account support to share your library with friends, it has Kobo integration that works with the native reader interface.
You get a URL generated that you put in the Kobo config file to "replace" Kobo's server. When you do a normal sync, all your Calibre will just automatically show up in My Books to download just like anything in your Kobo purchases (it also continues to check Kobo's server so you can see your purchases and buy from the store)
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
Its a web based front end to your calibre database. You can even upload new books and edit metadata from the web interface. It also has a docker implementation so it's pretty easy to set up.
Two services I use:
-- organization, and search, but no highlighting
-- organization, search, and highlighting
If you know how to run docker I'd recommend checking out calibre-web. It can be integrated with to place the kobo store so you can just download your books from calibre remotely.
Hi, had a similar challenge. As ebook server there is Calibre itself, which you are using now. Then there is calibre Web which uses the calibre db but is in my opinion way better calibre web . And then ubooquity which is also good to look at.
I suggest you take a look at COPS . It's perhaps an unfortunate acronym, but the idea is good. It's a stand-alone server for a copy of the calibre database -- all the books and all the metadata. I now have it running on a Raspberry pi and (when I get some time to play with it) will get the pi to act as a wifi hotspot. I'm liking the idea of having a battery-powered entirely portable calibre database. I don't really want my whole collection on an iPhone (or other reader) -- I'd rather download the dozen or so that appeal to me at any particular time.
Of course, this will do nothing for your audio book collection. According to this, calibre will catalog and serve audiobooks, (I didn't know that) so one server will do it all.
I have found nothing that would let me pass any notes I make on ebooks from one viewer to another -- or even maintain those notes if I delete the book from the reader's library. Reading progress for me is taken care of by the app I use for reading. I update a calibre metadata field ("Read on") when I complete a book.
So I'm not really sure that there is software that will do what I think I understand that you want.
Best of luck to you.
The Calibre option you mention sounds pretty cool, but that requires running Calibre on the networked computer, and my "networked computer" is a very low-powered NAS.
I'm on Windows, so I'm using a bat file, based on the Calibre-Portable.bat that ships with Calibre, like this (cut down to specifics) (E is the local drive, Q is the remote drive):
@echo OFF
CD E:\MinchinWeb\Documents\Calibre
REM Specify Location of ebooks
IF EXIST Q:\calibre (
SET CALIBRE_LIBRARY_DIRECTORY=Q:\calibre
ECHO LIBRARY FILES: Q:\calibre
REM ECHO LIBRARY FILES: %CALIBRE_LIBRARY_DIRECTORY%
)
REM Specify Location of metadata database (optional)
IF EXIST %cd%\CalibreMetadata\metadata.db (
IF NOT "%CALIBRE_LIBRARY_DIRECTORY%" == "%cd%\CalibreMetadata" (
SET CALIBRE_OVERRIDE_DATABASE_PATH=%cd%\CalibreMetadata\metadata.db
ECHO DATABASE: %cd%\CalibreMetadata\metadata.db
REM ECHO DATABASE: %CALIBRE_OVERRIDE_DATABASE_PATH%
ECHO '
ECHO ***CAUTION*** Library Switching will be disabled
ECHO '
)
)
ECHO Starting up Calibre...
Calibre --with-library "%CALIBRE_LIBRARY_DIRECTORY%"
ECHO Calibre Exited!
REM Copy Over database
ECHO Copy Databasee to NAS
xcopy %CALIBRE_OVERRIDE_DATABASE_PATH% %CALIBRE_LIBRARY_DIRECTORY% /f /y
REM Ping Calibre-Web to reload database
REM see https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/pull/934
ECHO Ping Calibre-Web
curl "http://books.nas.lan/reconnect"
ECHO Press any key to exit...
PAUSE
I use Calibra Web that I run as docker container through traefik. I use mostly KyBook 3 to read on iPad. It connects to it no problem.
In your situation, I'd go with calibre-web over the standard Calibre web client. It individualizes the user experience in a similar way to what you're looking for, albeit from a web interface instead of an app.
I did this, and the whole thing is running on a Raspberry Pi 4, and it does very well. If the library lives on the NAS, users can interact with the webserver, and you can use Calibre on another machine to easily edit metadata, upload, or convert things.
Of the ones you've mentioned, I've only ever used Alpine.
If you want to use LXC containers and have limited system resources, Alpine is amazing. The Alpine 3.11 template that Proxmox provides is less than 10MB if I remember correctly. And it uses an absurdly small amount of RAM when running as well. I have one LXC container using Alpine that runs only Calibre-Web and the whole container is using less than 20MB of RAM right now.
Of course, this level of minimalism has drawbacks. I've never attempted to use it as a desktop operating system, but I get the feeling that there are probably better options. Indeed, here's a quote from the Alpine Wiki::
>The desktop environment in Alpine has no official desktops. Older versions had Xfce4, but now, all GUI and graphical interfaces are community contributed. Environments such as LXDE, Mate, etc are available, but are not fully supported due to some bloated integration.
In other words, the desktop is not Alpine Linux's main priority. Maybe Alpine would pair nicely with a minimalist i3wm+dmenu setup without a compositor, but using something like KDE with Alpine would be "missing the point" of Alpine in my opinion.
An interesting thing to note is that Alpine Linux is the prefect refutation to the old "GNU+Linux" copypasta. Said copypasta contains this line:
> Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Alpine Linux is rather unique among Linux distros in that it doesn't ship with any GNU software by default. For example, it uses BusyBox instead of GNU Coreutils, and uses musl instead of glibc.
I have not tested this, But since you have asked for ideas. You can check if its possible to setup calibre-server or calibre-web or combination of them to manage ebooks.
Yes, as someone mentionned it's a Calibre Web server. It uses a calibre db with a different server than the default one
You may also sometimes discover dbs served by COPS.
I use a calibre implementation on the web, if you want to add an additional feature or want to create your instance you can contribute to the repository: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
Calibre naturally can host its own library by way of a browser. That is enabled in Preferences -> "Sharing over the net" (the default port here is 8080). After enabled, you forward port 8080 in your router to the computer running Calibre and this is accessible to any machine.
Now, you mention calibre-web - which is actually available here and it's a far superior interface to your books than Calibre itself (or anything else I've seen).
Installing that requires the following (this is what I'd do on Windows)
- Install Calibre - place its db somewhere you know, like c:\calibre-web\db\ on first run
- Install Python
- Install ImageMagick (for cover imaging)
- A bit of other configuration work
Then, run the calibre-web server with "python c:\calibre-web\cps.py"
Naturally, whatever port that lands on needs to be forwarded in your router too.
Calibre has a content server. You can turn it on using the Connect/share button. You could also look in to Calibre-Web, but I have not used that. If you are hoping to put the entire Calibre setup in the cloud, you should probably look into AWS, but I cannot help you there.
To add to this if you have a home server/NAS, calibre-web is a really good online version of calibre that includes a browser based reader. I have a docker container on OMV with my entire library. I don't use the browser reader too often mostly because I sync my books to a Kobo, but it works pretty well in my limited experience.
> But once my external ip address changes I lose access until I'm able to check what the new address is and update the settings in Moon+ Reader which I just find really annoying.
You indicated you have a dynamic DNS name, you should be using that to connect, not the IP.
As for your reverse proxy, that can be a lot of things, you'll have to put up more of your config/cover what you've already done. For instance, Calibre-web needs some headers set to work from a subpath like you are setup (i.e. under /calibre or /calibre-web instead of at the root). This docker-page actually has a sample nginx reverse proxy setup example:
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web/wiki/Setup-Reverse-Proxy
Thanks for your reply! So, been thinking about Nextcloud, but for elements like a epub/pdf library or video library, would I just have users navigate a filesystem to find and view? Is there anything that would allow users to search the library by title, metadata, etc. like calibre-web?
Yeah, I've tried that. Didn't change anything. Even went as far as making a rewrite rule and changing the redirect to try and spoof it into working - still nothing. I hope someone on here does have a solution. Its the only tab that I have yet to get to work properly. Not sure if it matters, but I am not using the original calibre web server, I'm using https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web . I was able to get the basic calibre web server to function, but that also is because setting a root url was an open option. Frusterating..
Anything against the server version, calibre-web? Pretty sure I just pointed it at my calibre database and it did its magic, set up users/auth and they can add their kindle emails or direct download.
I believe [https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web](calibre-web) (different than the base Calibre web server)likely checks off quite a few of those check-boxes.
Admin interface
User management with fine-grained per-user permissions
OPDS feed for eBook reader apps
Support for editing eBook metadata and deleting eBooks from Calibre library
Filter and search by titles, authors, tags, series and language
I've used it a few times and it's significantly more usable than the standard server that comes with calibre.
Speed isn't shockingly amazing with a larger library but my server is pretty weak and standard calibre isn't very fast either.
I generally use calibre-web it's a fantastic web app that uses a Calibre database on the back end, pulls metadata from Google, and if setup correctly can convert and send books to a Kindle at the click of a button. Personally I use a 32 GB Kindle and have an ebook library of about 200 books that takes up only about 4.5GB. I haven't found any good automated tools to pull books (I've tried lazylibrarian and it never seems to pull what I want) but I prefer to pull books from various websites manually and sometimes directly from Usenet. Not sure if I'm able to post those sites here so DM me if you'd like a list.
Calibre-web supports audiobooks (as single file of audio), although not highlighted anywhere in its readme. You can find evidence of it in the source code. The project could use some opensource love.
What you're looking for is Calibre-Web. Linuxserver runs a docker container of it as well. It hosts your Calibre database as a visually appealing online server.
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web is fantastic for this. It also supports sending to kindle email, individual user controls and preferences, etc. There's even a theme that makes it look like Plex.
Calibre itself is the single best ebook library manager around, however hte web UI is not the greatest. Use Calibre-Web on the server side. It has a better interface than the builtin calibre server, and the OPDS support works great.
If you're on android, I suggest using moon+ reader and adding your server as a source in the "Net Library" section. FBReader is also a solid option, and has an app for iphone as well.
Plex is closed source. The only people who could add ebooks into it would be the Plex team themselves, and they've flat out said it isn't going to happen. https://forums.plex.tv/t/add-ebooks-to-plex/74597
Yeah, Mine has a plex theme now and the sorting features are a lot better.
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
I'm using a docker of that. I'm not sure when it changed, but yeah was pleasantly supprised to see it.
I use the Calibre docker to manage my books inside my network, and CalibreWeb to make them available via the web. CalibreWeb integrates nicely with nginx/LetsEncrypt and has great features like multi-user support (So I can share it with my family), a send to Kindle feature for converting and pushing items to my kindle library. I've been very happy with it.
You may also want to try Calibre-Web instead of Cops or Ubooquity.
It's listed under dockerhub here: technosoft2000/calibre-web It works perfectly with unraid and it gives a much nicer interface than cops.
Here is the github page too: https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
welp... thats exactly what i wanted to hear!! Awesome dude! I will def join that room thanks! When you say there is no good ebook solution, have you seen calibre-web? Its obviously not everything that i want, but as an ebook only app, its pretty damn good... If you still dont think that is a good reading experience, im VERY excited to see what you come up with! Anyway, thanks for the tip, really looking forward to it :)
Yeah, it's practical for running on a server (calibre is rather heavy). I sync my Calibre library with dropbox, and just serve it from a VPS.
That said, if you don't know Node very well, there are other similar, probably better (older and more used) options:
- Calibre PHP OPDS Server
- Calibre Web (python)
Both support OPDS, and Calibre-Web supports users with personal "shelves" (per-user collections). They're both pretty neat.
I tried them both, but for me they lacked features I deemed essential:
- Ability to manage multiple Calibre libraries
- Ability to manage virtual catalogs
- Ability to be embedded in a larger application easily (I want to make my Calibre library part of my personal website and integrate it with my theme completely).
I tried forking the python one, but I suck at python and couldn't make it do what I wanted. The PHP one was easier, but I dislike running PHP (I like to be able to just run a server with a command...I know there's a PHP standalone server, but...it's another conversation). So I decided to create my own from scratch.
OPDS server is on the todo list, as well as virtual catalogs, but I don't need any of those features, so it's a distant future, unless someone requests/prs it.