Have you tried out https://booklore.org/ ?
It seems different enough from calibre and kavita et al.
Comment on What else should I selfhost?
MudMan@fedia.io 2 weeks agoI wish you didn't have to do things the Calibre way to host ebooks, but whatever effort it takes to sort out ebook hosting must be a pain in the ass, because everything is built on top of Calibre despite Calibre being perhaps the most obtuse piece of "programmer-knows-better" software ever engineered.
Almost every other ebook self-hosted app is just a wrapper on top of that nonsense. I hate it.
You can try to use Komga instead, but it's mostly meant for comic books and it's kinda heavy, honestly.
portnull@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
MudMan@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Have I? I tried so many so quickly I can't even remember.
In any case I'm part of the problem now, because my dealbreaker was having to organize my library in the obtuse alien way Calibre wants instead of the nice, human-readable way I already had. I bit that bullet, so now I'm married to a Calibre format library and thus perpetuating the terrible standard.
UxyIVrljPeRl@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Export all fixes that… Doing that to my syncthing to sync my files to the ereader. Still looking for a way to get rid of calibre :(
portnull@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
Yeah, it’s hard exit that directory structure once you have gone all in.
HeavenDeparts@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I love Booklore. Infinitely better than Calibre hands down. I haven’t setup Kobo access yet, but that is just going to push it over the edge for me.
dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It is a little convoluted how it’s set up, but I have a debt of gratitude to the Calibre community for their various add-ons freeing my legally purchased books of their DRM! Which is what enabled me to have centralized library in the first place, since they were all on different services. But now I’ve quit Amazon and have everything accessible from KOreader on my Kobo, via Calibre-web
MudMan@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
There's a reason Calibre-web is called Calibre-web. Calibre-web itself is a mitigation for how dumb Calibre is.
A lot of a very cool ecosystem is built on top of this one core piece of weirdness this one nerd made in his own alien mindspace and nobody likes any of the choices in there, but it's inescapable now, precisely because all these other cool, important tools are built around it.
See also: Gnome.
dustyData@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Calibre is so old that it’s use case and architecture precedes the current popularity of self-hosting. It is as old as the premiere of the very first e-ink reader in 2006. It’s not obtuse or weird, it was just the way things were done 20 years ago. The problem is that adapting it to work as a self hosted app or even multi user sync requires rewritting all of its backend from scratch with fundamentally different principles and use cases in mind. And guess what? Everyone is way too lazy to face that massive undertaking. Thus the hobbled together solutions.
Fortunately, one way backup to a NAS works perfectly fine to keep libraries secure. It’s not this way out of caprice, and the Dev is definitely not an nerd alien.
There have been attempts to create modernized replacements for calibre. But they all fall through because, caliber already does 99% of what they want to achieve. That one percent is covered by addons and shoddy workarounds? Yes. But that’s an effort to reward analysis any Dev is faced with. Calibre does much more than what the average user need, and they keep adding features. Because they’re not catering to one particular user but a community of a complex mix of users. Developing software is hard, rebuilding 20 years of features is daunting.
MudMan@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Nah, hard disagree. Calibre has quirks because it's old, but it also has quirks because it has quirks.
It's not particularly disputed that a lot of how its original pre-web UX was designed and the weirdly rigid, stunted structure of how it wants its libraries organized are a side effect of it originally being a one person project that seemed mostly designed to the preferences of its maintainer. And then there's all that baseline functionality from it being originally meant as a standalone app rather than a self-hosting thing layered on top of all the weird decisions.
I've been at this for a long time. I tried to use Calibre back when it was new, digital comic books were rars with jpegs in them and ebooks just sat in random directories as .txt files. It was weird then and it's weird now. If anything, the crazy ecosystem built around it has made it less weird now that a bunch of stuff is hiding the rough edges behind more modern/reasonable design.