Looking to remove Google play books from my life, so looking for something I can toss a bunch of stuff into and use.
Any good recommendations, with a decent UI?
For ebooks, my wife uses caliber and I use Kavita. No real reason to use one over the other I dont think. I like them both although Kavita has a slightly better reader for my liking. Both are a snap to self host and add books to.
+1 for Kavita, though I don’t use it for reading. I use OPDS in Kavita to read books on my phone (using MoonReader+ on Android) and share books with family.
Ill have to try moonreader or something similar. I tried using tachiyomi but it always fails to load. I mainly only use it on desktop for my ttrpg pdfs though so then ill just use kavitas reader
That’s odd that it won’t work with Tachiyomi for you. I followed the Kavita guide to connect it to Tachiyomi and it works fine for me.
The source is there, but none of my files load. To be fair, It could just be a me thing and doesn’t really matter? I haven’t tried it with any epub files or anything like that.
Odd… What are the files formatted as? All of mine are cbz’s.
Right now all Pdfs since theyre all ttrpg books. I should grab some of my wifes epubs and throw em in, see how they load
Guessing from the local manga guide pdfs wont work, but it looks like epubs should. I’ve never tried those though… It may only read the images from the epub, if there are any.
Oooh apparently Kavita can sync with KOreader using OPDS since October last year, I might have to get it set up!
Calibre is powerful and mature
I second calibre as well. I also use calibre-web as my front end for it. It has a very clean interface and user management if that’s your thing
I set up calibre-web on my home server but didn’t use it for very long. I’ve got my books separated into fiction, nonfiction and technical libraries and calibre-web could only handle one library database. I would have had to run multiple instances to get the different libraries served. I also still had a need to use calibre on my desktop so it was necessary to reimport the database from my desktop into calibre-web to keep things in sync. If you’re going to manage everything in the web interface it might work for you. It was just kind of unnecessary for my needs.
Maybe Kavita is what you need. Thats what Ive been using.
Nice! I hadn’t come across Kavita yet. I’ve been using CalibeWeb for years and always found it dated and clunky. I haven’t tried the demo yet, but the screenshots and feature list seem like it’s Jellyfin for ebooks. I’ll have to spin that up and give it a go.
My wife likes caliber more but I find Kavita better personally.
Looks clean and the screenshots look like it supports multiple libraries. Their demo site won’t log in but I might spin it up this weekend and play with it. I still probably don’t really have a use case for it. I’m always going to need calibre on the desktop. Ubooquity is another that I tried but still had the same lack of use. One of these days I might want to move to a web based solution but not really there right now.
Fair enough I suppose. Why would you need calibre on the desktop though?
I’m running calibre in a docker container, and have 3-4 libraries setup. I am able to access them all through the built in web service. I know it’s not the same as calibre-web but just want to point this out.
I can’t compare the reading options between the two though, having only tried the one option myself.
Kavita is the best one I used. But to be honest, there aren’t really great solutions for that out there… at least not as far as I can tell…
I use Komga, and for my tablet use Tachiyomi + komga plugin (there’s also a plug-in for kavita), I find it’s a better experience than using an OPDS reader
Awesome, thanks for all the recommendations folks! I’m going to try out calibre-web and kavita and see how they are
