Can anyone who has experience with both share a recommendation? I’m interested in the user side of things for ebooks (no comics) but also ease of installation and maintenance.
I currently use Calibre-web and while it runs well, I find it cumbersome to organize my books through it.
Edit: great responses, thank you. I do like the idea of just having the epubs in a folder and share those but at least on my setup, the desktop Calibrw app doesn’t open libraries that are mounted from remote locations. They also advise against it.
So for now I guess it’s a choice between a local folder or calibre -web
This is hilarious. I just set this up tonight. I use readarr to grab the books. Then Kavita Ingests them. Then I just use the app Pocketbook to read on my phone or tablet. It connects directly to your Kavita instance!
Sumatra + tree of folders organized in Windows Explorer.
I use Kavita exclusively for comics. I can’t imagine it’s great for regular books.
A self-hosted ebook solution would be nice. It’s surprising the holes in kindle even tbh
Calibre web easily sends to kindle and kobo. Works well
I tried Kavita first before moving over to calibre-web. Just with ebooks, no comics, the user experience in Kavita was a bit confusing (i.e. the way they reference books/series etc). Calibre-web does a much better job with ebooks imo. I will say the UI in Kavita is really nice. I have a Readarr->calibre->calibre-web stack, so Readarr/calibre takes care of organization for me, Calibre-web is essentially just a frontend to download and send to kindle
I gave Calibre a brief shot and was immediately put off by how big and clunky it was. I’m sure it would have been perfect if I gave it more of a shot and spent time tweaking.
Kavita has been my solution for the last probably 7 months and I’m loving it. I don’t need anything outside of “put book in place” and then “Open Kavita, see book” and it has been perfect for that. It’s essentially plex but with books in terms of how using and maintaining it has been.
The stack I use has been pretty solid:
- Calibre docker container accessible via Guacamole
- Calibre-Web docker container as “front-end”
- Readarr docker container to obtain new books via Usenet (primarily ALTHub)
- SABNzbd docker container to download
Readarr searches Usenet for books, then sends what it finds to SABNzbd, which downloads the file to a folder that Calibre watches, which then imports the book and adds it to its database, which Calibre-Web has access to, so in a minute or two it’s available in Calibre-Web for download/reading/conversion.
If for some reason the book isn’t available via Readarr/Usenet, it can be downloaded via other methods and uploaded to Calibre-Web, so everything ends up in the same place.
Same but i add lazylibrarian for mags
Man, I tried so hard to get LL working, but couldn’t make it happen. Maybe it’s time to try again…
Its in a pretty good state right now. Docker setup is a breeze.
What makes it easier for me is i dont try to integrate with calibre. It has a setting to copy new books to calibre autoimport dir
Also dm me if you get stuck. I wrote the latest docs revision and used to mod /r/lazylibrarian
I used to use Kavita for ebooks and it was a pain to organize them. I usually just dump a bunch of .epubs into books directory, but it only recognizes books INSIDE of a folder. So, I just made a script to create a folder using the exact name and put the epub in it.
I solved that for myself by making genre folders and just tossing books in them haphazardly as I download them.
