A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
I use Kavita to host ebooks and manga for myself. It's still work in progress, so do expect changes, though I haven't had huge issues on the stable releases so far. Besides Tachiyomi for comics/manga there aren't any native reading apps yet, so you will have to use the webinterface for the time being.
Another option often mentioned is Calibre Web, though I haven't used that myself.
I'll throw in my vote for Kavita. Works great. I read a lot on my phone so I just saved the app shortcut to my home screen from Firefox.
I use kavita and kavitaEmail as well and haven't had issues. I like the email service so I can send a book to my kindle when I want to start it.
I honestly prefer Kavita even though I do not download comics or manga. Their reader is so nice, specially with the themes. 0 issues on my end except for indexing, which the dev promptly fixed after I reported the issue.
I use Moon+ Reader pro on my android, and on my iOS I simply make a "webapp" of the website.
Moon+ Reader doesn't sync though, does it? I thought there weren't any readers that supported OPDS-PS, just simple downloading.
No, you're right, it does not sync. Usually I do this on longer durations without internet, else I just use a webapp (on mobile) or the website on PC.
Throwing my hat in for Kavita. It just works, and works well for all the comics and ebooks I consume.
Check out the docker version of calibre if you're into that https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web
To clarify, calibre-web is not "the docker version of calibre", it's a separate project that provides a nice web frontend for an existing calibre database.
Correct, wrong link I was on mobile
Correct, wrong link was on mobile
So if I understand correctly, I would spin up a Calibre docker (a la https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre) and then spin up a separate Calibre-web docker and point it to the first one?
I believe you can, but I just copied the calibre books and database from my PC and run it from calibre-web without maintaining any link to calibre.
It's not perfect but it works well enough.
I do it like this. Manage calibre on my PC, and copy the 'Calibre Library' contents to the server through ftp.
That's correct! I can share my docker-compose if that's helpful. I'm on my phone, but I believe they just have to share a volume.
Caliber is great, but if you have audiobooks, auidiobookshelf has gotten pretty decent at hosting ebooks too
Do you mean Calibre?
Yeah, my phone really didn’t wanna let me type it correctly and I didn’t bother figuring it
I run calibre, it has a server option, which can be queries bij Moon+ reader. (which I use) My setup is internal use only though.
It's not as clean a solution as they'd like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say "not as clean," I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.
they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface
I mean, you could just integrate the browser's pdf viewer, no?
Probably, though I don't know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.
I've been playing with Audiobookshelf and it does do books as well.
Take a look at Calibre-Web (github.com/janeczku/calibre-we…) which I've been using for what you ask for quite a while now. As the name suggests it can also take advantage of a pre-existing Calibre eBook Database.
Takes advantage of = requires.
Of course you are right, and this should be noted.
But if you so happen to have Calibre already running via for instance your desktop installation you, may also "take advantage your pre-existing Calibre database" in Calibre-Web ;-)
Calibre is great but it’s not a server based program, it’s just a desktop client. There is Calibre-web which you can host which kinda turns it into a server but it does that by exposing a website you connect to that shows you the Calibre interface via VNC, so it’s a bit hackey.
I haven’t tried it but https://www.kavitareader.com/ might be a good alternative if you end up not liking Calibre.
That's not what calibre-web does. As per the GitHub page:
Calibre-Web is a web app that offers a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks using a valid Calibre database.
There is no VNC involved.
There's a Calibre container, I believe by LinuxServer.io, that comes with this VNC setup for serving calibre in a browser window. Probably what was meant here.
Calibre-web is basically a nice UI for a file server over the calibre library.
Labors reader looks really great. Just wish it had an iOS/android app. I’ll definitely keep it in mind.
Audiobookshelf is quite nice too. The ebook reader isn't quite there yet, but it develops very fast. Also apps for Android and iOS