Comment on How I self-host my ebooks and audiobooks
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Excellent writeup! Thanks for posting. Lately, I’ve been using Calibre Web Automated, an active fork with a lot of added features and compatibility features.
Depending on someone’s setup it may or not be worth it to switch (Calibre-web works great), but I’d definitely recommend it for someone starting up.
that’s me.
my partner asked me to self-host their e-books. For now i only have jellyfin (on Debian) running to stream music locally. I bookmarked calibre-web last week as an e-book solution.
What made you choose c-w automated over c-w? Any other advices?
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Sure. As a fork, it has all of the benefits of Calibre-web. It’s stable, well established, versitile, works well with Calibre desktop software (they are three different projects, despite the similar names). Yet it has a number of different features like automatic ingest, writing/converting files, sending to different devices, etc. There is a pretty complete list on the GitHub page I linked. It has a big community and active development, so its likely that any features you might look for could be coming soon.
There are other self hosted software projects for ebooks (you can even use Jellyfin!). I had switched to Booklore at one point for a more modern UI and tracking, but it was more flash than execution and ultimately looks like it flamed out over some community issues. There are also projects like Kavita that are designed for features around comics/manga, but also do an excellent job with ebooks in general.
You should consider two things: what the library looks like, and where it will be read. If it is mostly books with a few other media (like comics, PDFs, etc.), then CWA is probably a good bet. If it’s mostly comics and manga with some books and other media, consider whether Kavita is the better fit. If it is mostly DRM content, and you or if you want to manage it through Calibre Desktop, how does it connect? How often are new books being added and from where?
What screen will it ultimately be read on? If it’s an ereader, check out the “books” and “self-hosted” communities here on Lemmy for which protocol, etc. is used. If it will be read on a computer or mobile device, what apps are available? Will it be read on multiple devices?
For example, if it is a small library, read on an Android/iOS device, Jellyfin with JellyBook may be fine. If it is a large manga library already tracked on AniList, Kavita may be a good bet. If features like notes and highlights are important to sync across devices, something like Anx Reader with WebDAV might even be better.
What OP describes is an excellent setup for 90% of cases.
i will start with jellybook to keep it simple. i didn’t know there was a jellyfin plugin for ebooks.
thanks for taking the time to share all that information