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.

  • scholar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 years ago

    Jellyfin has ebook support and allows you to download them for offline reading, which I reccommend because the ebook viewer is very basic

    • PanaX@lemmy.mlEnglish
      6·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • ⓝⓞ🅞🅝🅔@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      This.

      We each have an account. Login to the web interface. Choose the desired book. Click send. The epub is emailed to our Kindle.

      Running calibre-web off a docker instance. Library is on my NAS.

      I use the Window client to add books, handle conversions, and manage things since I have specialized plugins. You can read via the web app as well, but I prefer my ancient Paperwhite.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        The epub is emailed to our Kindle.

        Amazon have been making this harder and harder. Originally you could define an allowlist of senders, and any emails from those senders would go to the Kindle. Then they changed it so you have to click a link in an email to approve it. Now, you have to go to Amazon, find the Kindle content page (which is well hidden), and click a button to approve it.

        If you know a workaround for that then I’d love to hear it.

  • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • frazorth@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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?

    • frazorth@feddit.ukOPEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      I use Kavita. I have some minor complaints but in general it works.

      I haven’t tried others though, so can’t say if it’s the best or not.

  • snakedrake@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      Yeah. An eInk device that can run an Android file browser and just grab eBook files off the local network is a fantastic solution.

  • uzay@infosec.pubEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    I think kavita works fairly well. It doesn’t have an app, but it comes with a built-in OPDS server, so you can just plug the link into any app that supports it and access all your book. For eink devices I recommend koreader. For other devices you may prefer an app with a less confusing UI, but that’s a matter of preference. Alternatively the kavita webclient has a reader as well.

  • ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • paddirn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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).

  • Faceman🇦🇺@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Molecular0079@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years ago

      The reader itself leaves a lot to be desired though. There’s literally no UI besides the arrow keys and no way to configure font rendering etc. It’s cool that the functionality is there, but it needs work.