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.
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!
What about Calibre databse but Calibre-web for a daily use?
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?
Calibre
❤️
Thank you. Half the battle is learning the correct terminology!
Why not just use files?
Because unfortunately that wouldn’t pass the spouse test.
I mean she could, until she is bored.
Plus this is hopefully a self hosted community, so understands that I don’t mind doing a bit of legwork up front to gain an ease of use later down the line.
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.
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.
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).
So not a solution you’re asking for but the remarkable e-ink tablet has a great set of apps for mobile devices and computers. It hosts your books in the cloud so you’ll always have access to stuff anywhere with internet. Automatically syncs across devices. Pretty slick.
Yeah. An eInk device that can run an Android file browser and just grab eBook files off the local network is a fantastic solution.
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.
This might be what you’re looking for https://lemux.minnix.dev/post/157074
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.
AudiobookShelf does more than audiobooks. You can do epubs, etc.
I shill audiobookshelf every chance I get.
I know you said “self hosted”, but if you are interested in an Android app, Google Play Books does most of what you want, I think. You can upload your books, and read them on any device (with offline capabilities). But this is the Self Hosted community, so I will show myself out.
Literally the opposite of the point of the whole community there bud
How well does that work on eink displays? I guess I’ll have to try it, but the Kindle app always tries to add animation on Android.
On kindle, if you tap the middle of the screen, then click the little Aa up top, you get formatting options. On reflowable formats, you can go to the more tab and uncheck the animation button. On ones that are fixed pages, it should be one of the only options.
