The Calibre Content Server | Hacker News Reader

The Calibre Content Server

manual.calibre-ebook.com

314 pointsdabber140 comments

I've always just used Calibre because it's a nice way for me to strip DRM and then archive my books. I've never really used it any kind of active way. Since I buy pretty much everything from Amazon, I already effectively have a content server.

Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)? I'm curious to see what the presentation is like. What's the typography like? Does the screen dim after 30s? What's the browser battery consumption like compared to an ereader app?

Long term, my big concern about ebooks is DRM. Amazon's most recent version (KFX) hasn't been cracked and workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file with older, crappier hyphenation and layout. I've started mostly buying DRM free books from Amazon, but they don't make it easy to find them.

I've yet to run into an Amazon-purchased book that Calibre can't liberate, and I haven't even updated Calibre since installing it a few years back. Where are you seeing this turn up? If I need to be looking for alternate sellers or finding some workaround, better to know it ahead of time, I suppose.

KFX just started rolling out in recent months.

As the parent post said, the only way right now to "crack" is to dodge it. To have Amazon send you a copy of your book for a older device or older version of the PC software that doesn't support KFX, so they have to send you a crackable format instead.

I haven't done anything with Barnes & Noble in quite some time, but I've been curious to try a eBook purchase from there to see if their current DRM is any more friendly.

That explains why I haven't seen it! I haven't updated Kindle for PC in years, either.

Thanks for the info! I might have to give B&N a try myself, although at the moment the only books on my list are preordered.

Most of the DRM removal tools are based on Apprentice Alf's DeDRM library. Here's the Github issue related to KFX:

https://github.com/apprenticeharper/DeDRM_tools/issues/38

Does this mean if you used kindle unlimited you could effectively keep the books forever?

As mentioned just up thread, if you don't purchase in the most recent KFX DRM format, you can strip the DRM. However AFAIK this is illegal to do for Kindle Unlimited ebooks. You are not supposed to keep them, just borrow.

If you are going to pirate the book, you might as well just go straight to something like Pirates Bay. It's much easier.

Very many books are not available on torrent sites.

Very many are available on library genesis among others. The pirate bay is a bad place for books.

How do you differentiate between DRM-free and DRM-protected books on Amazon?

Up until I have read this comment, I didn't even know that Amazon support DRM-free books.

Tor doesn't put DRM on any of it's titles. For an example, look up Cory Doctorow's book Walkaway. At the bottom of the book description it says:

> At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Unfortunately, they don't always tell you. If you look up Little Brother (another of Doctorow's books), it doesn't say anything about DRM even though the book doesn't have DRM.

Ah, well, at least the sentence is consistent and does not change. Something like:

    site:amazon.com "At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied."

Gives me ~37.4k results (out of ~5m Kindle books, assuming that Google indexed every single one of them).

All of Cory Doctorow's books are available DRM free and free-as-in-beer free from his website, craphound.com

He's always made a point of that

Walkaway is his first book that isn't available from his website for free.

oh, ok

It's completely up to the publisher (or author if self-published) to enable DRM or not via a checkbox in the UI when publishing on Amazon.

We've been releasing ours with the same CC license as Cory Doctorow, but honestly very few people really seem to care, unfortunately.

My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

Most of my purchases are from Weightless Books [1] which sells only DRM free books and magazines.

Granted, this is a limited and small market (SF related stuff) but if I have a choice of getting a book DRM free from a vendor or getting it from Amazon, I would avoid Amazon, even if its price was cheaper.

[1] https://weightlessbooks.com/

Baen [1] are also still DRM-free and sell a bunch of smaller publishers too, but again it's all fairly genre-limited.

[1] http://www.baen.com/baenebooks

I agree. I've purchased a lot of things from Angry Robot[1]. It's a similar story: smaller market and mostly SF, but I've enjoyed a large number of their offerings. You purchase in UKP via Paypal (no need for Paypal account), but the conversion has never seemed to have been a problem.

[1] https://www.angryrobotbooks.com/

> My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

This severely limits what ebooks one can read. I used to torrent DRM-free epubs and buy the paper copy so I could support the work without appearing to support DRM. Lately though I've been skipping the torrent part and just buying the paper books.

I wonder how many people do this and if it over inflates piracy figures or physical book readership

Does it even matter when the people using these numbers will distort the facts anyway?

(this may not apply that much to books but most types of content are usually filled with DRM garbage, region restrictions, usually have worse quality and distribution methods, and they pretend to not understand why people choose to pirate it)

If you think most people who pirate are aware of region restrictions or notice the quality difference, I think you're mistaken. That's a rationale that some idealists use, but most people would just rather not pay.

Streaming video piracy sites are becoming more popular than downloading, and that's usually poorer quality and worse interfaces than the official sources.

> but most people would just rather not pay

These people wouldn't pay no matter what you do so it's not really relevant. I'm talking about people who resort to piracy because they can't pay to get what they want. Or the value just isn't justifiable.

For example, I feel cheated when I have to wait months for content to be available in my country. Sometimes years (or not ever). So I go and download some torrent since I can't buy the content anyway. And now I'm one of the numbers on their spreadsheets.

If licensing is broken or too hard to manage, they should spent the money fixing that instead of going after "pirates".

> but most people would just rather not pay

I purchase out-of-print paper books, but I would really like to get out of the dead-tree-storage business.

A couple of years ago we donated most of our 3000 books to our school. I still have boxes, though. Mostly textbooks, because textbook sales terms have become even more exorbitant than when we were students.

I would gladly pay for eBook copies of the novels I own and enjoy. Many are simply not for sale.

And textbook market is getting weird: either $200 each, or open courseware for little or no $$.

I've never met anyone in person who thought it sounded worthwhile.

I did go back to paper books. I used to love Kindles, I bought them as gifts all the time (the device), but I want a DRM-free copy of books I buy.

I used to think DRM by Amazon was a kind of wink-wink nudge-nudge, we pretend to do DRM but we don't really. But then they went serious about it, and so I left the platform.

This is often the case for me as well. I buy the paper book and send it on for (destructive) scanning, netting me a DRM free ebook.

Kobo has a fairly excellent selection of ebooks, some of which have DRM, but there are straightforward tools for removing it, if that's your cup of tea.

Whatever else is wrong with it the Kindle store is incredibly convenient in a way that sideloading books isn't. I can tether to my phone and get a book instantly wherever I happen to be at the moment.

I will buy DRM-free when it's available, but stripping DRM from Kindle Store is the next best option, and usually cheaper too.

Amazon should have an DRM-free option or fingerprinting option for publishers. I am not sure if it does. I believe some publishers would be fine with fingerprinting, since that is what they do on their own sites when you buy a PDF (Springer is one). All the Gutenberg books on Amazon are DRM-free I believe, and it's just more convenient to get them there if you have a kindle and have a significant collection of eBooks from the last few years.

>My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

Why? Just because of DRM?

Yes.

It's philosophical for me. Yes, I could buy a DRM book and then strip the DRM but that is self-defeating in the long run, in my opinion.

By refusing to buy DRM books from Amazon and choosing to buy from non-DRM providers instead, I'm sending a message as a consumer about my DRM preferences. I'm also trying to support the non-DRM providers by keeping them in business.

Buying DRM books from Amazon, then stripping it away quietly only signals that you don't mind DRM and discourages other people from directly providing non-DRM options.

> Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)?

[Izzy's eBook Library of English Public Domain books](https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=en)

[Izzy's eBook Library of German Public Domain books](https://ebooks.qumran.org/opds/?lang=de)

[Feedbooks' have a "Free" category in this following library](http://www.feedbooks.com/catalog.atom)

[Free books on Beam Shop](https://www.beam-shop.de/angebote-specials/gratis/?p=1) (from a quick check, titles were in English, but could be German, too, or mixed)

[Manybooks](http://manybooks.net/opds/)

There are also others but in Hungarian, Russian, Japanese languages. Besides, there is always Gutenberg.org for Classics.

I don't think those are running the Calibre Content Server. I was hoping to find a live instance so that I could see what the books look like in my browser.

What are some of the sites for Japanese books?

In Japanese or translated to English? If you are interested in a collection of Japanese bestsellers/classics, translated to English, then asking over at the /lit/ forum of 4chan (hear! hear!) will yield you some interesting answers. Other...I don't know.

Aw, I was looking for Japanese books in Japanese

Why are you guys so concerned about authors trying to control the profitless distribution of their product? I'm being serious -- what's the issue?

That's not really a relevant question.

We are concerned about content that we purchase being tied to a single method of distribution which may disappear at any given moment, so we make backups which will be compatible with future and past devices and storage.

Why should they control it? I want to buy one copy of a book and then lend it to my friends and family members and borrow books that they have bought. I want to give my old collection of YA sci-fi to my friend's kid. I want to browse my friends' bookshelves and borrow something that looks interesting.

Because their quest for control works only when it restricts the things I've always been able to do with paper books.

When I buy books I can give them away, I can resell them, I can loan them to you, I can leave them to my kids in my will, and I can read them in any country that I want.

I want to be able to do the same things with digital books. I remove the DRM from every book that I buy and I feel no guilt over doing so. Today I read on a Kindle, but maybe tomorrow I want to buy a Kobo device. When I do, I don't want to lose access to my library.

Is any of that unreasonable?

Perhaps that's just the price you pay for access to ebooks at all -- particularly via an incredibly convenient system like Kindle? (Also, loaning -- the most pressing concern here -- is supported.)

Authors need to get paid. I completely understand the irritation DRM presents, but if you want to be able to resell your books or pass them down through the generations, maybe paper copies are the way to go under our present conditions.

A second question. Most of us, I presume, work in software. How do you approach the distribution of your work? Is unlimited piracy of your code an acceptable price to pay for giving customers unfettered access to the product of your labor, in your eyes?

Loaning is supported as long as the other person is also using a Kindle. I think if there were a non-proprietary DRM system where I could give my books away or loan them to friends reading on non-Amazon devices, I would feel a lot better about it. Having access to your library when you travel is also a pretty big deal.

You suggest sticking with paper books, but the accessibility benefits (ie large typefaces or screenreaders) that you get with ebooks is hard to give up. For some people, it isn't a matter of choosing between paper or digital, it's digital or nothing.

I agree that authors should usually get paid (I say usually because I support public libraries). However, I don't think there's much evidence that DRM helps authors get paid. Is there a popular book that hasn't been pirated thanks to DRM? Do you think the Amazon lock-in that DRM provides is good for the industry? I certainly don't.

As for your second question, you are probably not going to get the answer you expect. Lots of people here support and work on free and open source software.

Open source software is fantastic -- but is that how we're making our livings? From what I can tell, OSS is either a) a labor of love, in addition to a separate full-time job, b) supported by a nonprofit that pays you a salary out of grants and donations, or c) supported by a corporation that pays you a salary out of EE sales or support revenue. (There may be exceptions, but they seem few.) Only (a) bears any resemblance to the business model for authors.

Some authors certainly receive nonprofit monies, but funding for the arts is notoriously thin. If you were able to create a corporation that sells support contracts for literature or an enterprise edition for scholarship -- and payed out to authors regardless of how well their product performed -- then there might be a comparison.

I wished people thought so high of my code that they actively tried to use it,even through illegal means.

Your question is based on two premises: that DRM reduces piracy by a non-negligible amount, and that anyone pirating a copyrighted work would have otherwise purchased it legally. The available evidence contradicts both.

The other day I walked past a few used book stores. I'm quite sure many of the publishers are out of business - yet the books can be read.

Books only available behind solid DRM will dissappear along with those who operate the drm system. Never mind the fact that they allow for virtual book burning by taking control over the DRM.

See Microsoft zune, yahoo music. Consider that we still read books that are 100s of years old, and ask yourself if you believe DRM will help or hinder the spread of books. Add to this the possibility of "banning" books in certain regions (as with Netflix, Amazon video) - the role of DRM in ensuring corporate profit (author rights and profits are hardly their raison d'être) - puts the world at unacceptable risk.

Copyright doesn't last forever, but DRM can. That's actually a pretty big problem. Maybe DRM vendors should have to share the key and an unlock method with the librarian of Congress?

Good idea - and if the Feds think that asking for backdoors in encryption is reasonable, I don't see how they could possibly disagree with that.

> workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you an older version of the file

I have stopped buying ebooks from Amazon when I discovered I couldn't strip DRM from them anymore, but I wasn't aware of these workarounds.

Where can I find tutorials about those? (I have about 20 ebooks I bought between the time KFX came out and the time I found out about it).

Re public domain books, try out Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Related but slightly off topic:

Am I the only one who is turned off to calibre due to how "heavy" and clunky it feels? I suspect this is due to the program being written in Java. I think the author does great work maintaining the project but frankly wish it was more modern.

Perhaps this is a good side project for me to delve into ;)

EDIT: thanks to users who clarified that Calibre is written in python.

Hey just be glad it's not another one of those even clunkier nodejs "desktop" apps

To be honest though, calibre just works for me. Sure it's not a super optimized c++ project but there's so many things it can do. See I just need to transfer ebooks to my kindle, and it does it perfectly every time.

For what it's worth, there isn't a single line of Java in the source code.

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre

Calibre is written in Python

I've used it for years and love its features but yeah the UI and processing always felt heavy like a java app but as someone else noted it's not java - it's python so I suspect the laggy of slowness in the UI might be a side effect of python's single threaded / GIL performance issues. Python can be fast, especially for scientific work but in my experience - I get annoyed by python apps more than other interpreted languages such as Ruby as it often seems to peg a single core to 100% whenever I'm waiting for something to finish processing - again I'm sure it's the way things are written more than the language itself as such but it seems it makes it hard to write python applications that make efficient use of modern multi core CPUs. (I host a lot of Python, Ruby and web apps written in various other languages).

Much as I love pyGTK, apps written in it feel pretty chunky :/

Here's looking at you, Mint Menu

(not nearly as bad as Electron though)

I disagree, while Electron apps have trade offs, I never experience the experience of clunkiness I find with Calibre.

Try resizing a window in any Electron app. Bonus points if you have display scaling enabled.

Works fine. That's not the issue with electron (for me at least), it's battery life/power consumption.

On every machine I've used any Electron app on, there are large gray areas that flash and lag behind the mouse cursor when resizing (it's especially noticeable on Slack). On hidpi displays, half the time there are 1px black lines remaining on the right and bottom sides (probably due to poor rounding). Compare that to native apps like Sublime or Windows Explorer.

Just tested on both a 4k 13" Windows Display and a 2K 15" Mac Display - yes I see what you mean. That is pretty bad, though I've never noticed that before.

its qt

First things first its python and qt. To me it feels quite responsive. I also have no idea what "modern" means in this context unless you mean flat with few buttons or options. Calibre can be styled by choosing a qt5 style for your system. If your default is ugly you ought to change it. Such styles can be chosen in your gui configuration menu or via qt5ct at least under linux.

This is what it looks like for me. http://imgur.com/a/px8zF

That said I don't want to start up a whole app just to open a book I usually just open books via a script that wraps calibredb a cli interface to calibre's ebook library. If more than one result is available in response to a query it shows them via rofi. https://davedavenport.github.io/rofi/

It also remembers the last n books that have been opened whether they have been opened in the gui, a script, or otherwise and when called without arguments it returns the list of recent reads which can be selected via rofi. Since I often return to the same several books repeatedly on multiple sessions this is a more pleasant way to access my books.

My script is a bunch of not so awsome shell script. If you want to improve something a better cli experience out of the box for calibre would be nice.

Calibre feels like a set of tools which can be accessed by a UI, its not really intuitively organized. There's not much of a sense of a hierarchy of concerns for instance. Still, credit to the maintainer, it's an amazing piece of work.

> Perhaps this is a good side project for me to delve into ;)

By all means, please do. There are no alternatives out there to calibre. I think its an excellent app once you get used to it, but competition is healthy.

> I suspect this is due to the program being written in Java.

Nope, it's Python.

I don't find it heavy, just that the UI is not pleasant. From the icon, to the splash screen, to the many extraneous menu items and buttons. I find it painful to use, but there doesnt seem to be a good alternative. I guess that means I should create one.

I've been searching for a solution to handle the various ebooks I buy and to allow me to annotate them in a centrally stored location. I have kindle purchases, pdfs, epubs, and mobis from various publishers.

Moon Reader (http://www.moondownload.com) would be great if it had a desktop or web-based client...however, it's only supported on Android. If Calibre can give me this experience, it's value just increased immensely. Looking forward to trying this.

"Note:

"On initial release, the book reader is fully functional but is missing some more advanced features from the main calibre viewer, such as popup footnotes, bookmarks and annotations in general. These will be added in due course. In fact, the browser reader is designed to eventually replace the main viewer, once it matures."

Indeed. Awesome news...

On mobile I would rather use something that doesn't stop working when I don't have internet access. I kind of expect any browser based reader to be thoroughly mediocre compared to actual clients.

"The server downloads and stores the book you are reading in an off-line cache so that you can read it even when there is no internet connection."

I love it in principle but, considering how small most books are relatively to storage space offered by modern devices, even mobile ones, what is the upside of storing content centrally instead of just carrying a copy with you?

You know how everybody shares their tv and movie collections with Plex? I suspect this is a way of doing the same thing with books.

Yeah, I get that this is what they're aiming for but home server with Plex is justified by the massive size a video and even music collections can reach.

I think a lot more people share their music and video collections than their book collections despite the file size differences. Maybe it's because there isn't a book-Plex?

I've never heard of plex except in eve online context, but people have been sharing calibre content server links for many years

Maybe it's because music and video can be easily consumed during the duration of a visit, whereas books take much longer? "Check out what I have on the server" makes sense for music and much less sense for books.

Plex can also transcode, which is more important if your video is on a bunch of different formats that might not have hardware support on all your devices.

>As a result, you do not need to install any dedicated book reading/management apps on your phone

You still need to remember to sync your new books to your local device at some point. This lets you do it anywhere/anytime, thus avoiding the scenario of leaving for holiday and forgetting entirely.

Many of my ebooks are anywhere from 50 to 350 Mb. That adds up when you want to load many of them. The downside of course is that you need a good Net connection, unless the Calibre Content Server can be configured to do some kind of 'trimming', while serving the ebooks over the wire.

Also a content server mitigates you having to manage and synchronise your ebooks in multiple places. You only need to manage one library. Although I guess any sync application can work just as well for this.

Why are your ebooks so large?

They contain a lot of colour images and diagrams. Books on biology and art. Granted other topics including fiction are usually in the ballpark of a few megabytes.

Kilobytes even

Since it's browser based you won't be loading 350mb, you'll be loading one page at a time.

Not all ebooks are small. Especially when they're in PDF. I have some that are upwards of 20-30 mb.

I used to COPS on my nas. I would add books using calibre, stored on the nas, and served up via COPS. Many apps (I used FBReader) have OPDS capabilities. This is a sort of online catalog which your reader can browse, search, and download books from. I almost never used the online reading feature, but did utilize the catalog concept quite a bit, especially when switching devices. I had a rooted Nook that had both FBReader and Kindle reader installed, giving me a sort of "best of three worlds" reader. I did have to "page sync" manually. I would do this by memorizing a sentence or phrase on one device and then search for it on the other device.

https://github.com/seblucas/cops https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/OPDS

I use raspis to host a local calibre service to share collaborative materials and resources in office, at home to share media with guests ("hey, take a look at this magazine article/graphic novel/campaign"), and for when I want to make available format shifted content and documents through libreoffice headless (not everyone wants pdf/mobi/docx/etc).

I can also throw up another instance to serve to specific groups, like relatives or kids, so they can download and network print deemed safe content like crosswords or recipes.

You can probably see why I wouldn't want that on my phone all at once.

I have 11gb of books and less than 11gb free on my device. Although I don't use the content server I do use calibre companion to wirelessly connect and sync select books based on author or tag. Even if I were syncing the entire library calibre is a nice way to manage metadata and sync and calibre companion is a nice search interface.

Also a single central location + backup ensures that your books are unlikely to be lost.

I thought that this was a recently added feature. Turns out it has been there since at least 2011 (based on a forum thread about it). Will have to try it!

The content server has been around for a while, but the ability to read the books in the browser is new.

Newish, it's been around for at least a few months now, since I first tried it out a few months ago. I got excited seeing the link on HN, thinking it was some new feature added to the server

I did a little go server to expose an opds basend of a dir structure

https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds

So far I only tested on moonreader

It would be great if this feature was extended so that I can sync my books across different Calibre installations on different machines.

Hell... yes. That would be a holy grail for me.

I store everything in Calibre. When I buy an eBook from Amazon, the first thing I do is strip the DRM. Because even though I'm basically happy with my Kindle library, I don't want to lose all my stuff if they change their policies to something I'm not happy with in the future.

So I'm doing most of my library management from a PC, but doing most of my reading from a Kindle Fire. There's no great solution for this, so I've just been taking the books that I'm actively reading and copying them into Dropbox.

This is an interesting project, and I'm sure I'll try it out. But I'm skeptical of using a browser-based book reader on my Kindle. Say what you want about Amazon, their native reading app is still the best I've ever seen by far. Meanwhile, even Amazon's own web-based reader is crap.

[Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) is the perfect tool for the job. Set Calibre's directory on your PC as the main folder, and it'll propagate changes wherever you want.

Can't you just put your library and database on git or Dropbox? It should just work, unless you're accessing them from two devices at the same time.

Yup, that's exactly what I do. I sync over the database and library over to Nextcloud to have it available on both of the operating systems I'm using.

It's also synced automatically to an external hard drive connected to the Raspberry Pi, so I have two backups (one online, one offline) in case something goes wrong.

Exactly. The problem is that you lose searchability. On the filesystem, Calibre organizes your library in a series of subdirectories named by author. If you want to find a book by title, or some other criteria... or even when it's a book with multiple co-authors and don't know which one Calibre selected as the primary... then you'll have a bad time.

Don't people learn how to use their OS's file searching capabilities anymore?

I do, with Dropbox, and it mostly works... but it's very easy to get the database corrupted even if you are careful not to have more than one instance of Calibre open.

I haven't tried using a source control system, that might work better. Hmmm.

And of course that only works for computers, There isn't a full version of Calibre for Android.

Out of curiosity, how does your DB on Dropbox get corrupted if not by having more than one instance of Calibre open?

I'm asking because I use Dropbox to store my Keepass DB, and so far (2+ years) I haven't had any problems.

I don't know. But I occasionally find files with names like foo(username's conflicted copy).db.

I do the Keepass thing too, and this has happened with it's files as well, but that doesn't seem to cause any problems.

Those aren't corrupted databases, it just can't merge so it leaves you to pick the version you want. Just pick one and keep using it, at most you'll lose some recent changes from the other computer.

I should have known not to use language imprecisely on HN. :)

To the layman, any situation that results in having Calibre show books which are not in fact there, or having books in the library which are not shown in Calibre, or having Calibre's check library function report that there are "invalid titles", "missing formats" etc., could be casually described as "corruption".

Sure, but the worst case is that you don't see books which are in your filesystem, and then all you need to do to fix that is click "Add books".

There is calibre companion an app that lets you sync all or part of your library. To sync you would merely connect wirelessly and then search for ondevice:false and send those to the device.

Wouldn't that trigger copyright defender algorithms and cause your Dropbox account to be suspended?

AFAIK they only run the DMCA checksum when the file/folder is shared. Keeping it inside your own account is OK.

I do with Dropbox too, along with a portable version of Calibre. For syncing to my andoid phone, I use [Calibre Companion](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.multipie.c...).

I wonder if some improvements to Calibre would be a good project for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14552615

I am a happy user of Calibre and am grateful for the work the author has done, but I've never heard a convincing explanation of why it is so slow when adding books and updating metadata. 10-15 seconds to add a 500KB ePub. I have apps that will transcode 4K video at a higher throughput than that. What's it doing?!

Is the database on a local or network drive?

2 seconds to add a 12MB pdf

Calibre 2.85 Funtoo Linux Current reading a file from a ssd that wasn't previously cached or opened prior to test. Same speed with a 300k file therefore obviously time is dominated by whatever calibre does when it adds a book not reading the file.

Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix it.

Is this a function of the number of existing books in the library? Basically does this appear only with large libraries? Might be worth filing a bug I have found the author to be pretty quick in responding.

Nope. Works slow with 0 books, although I do have about 700, which still is by Big-Oh standards, at least it should be, small.

2422 books here all of the above ought to be small though as noted. I think it would be interesting to profile and figure out which part is slow. Is it equally slow if you run calibredb add in the terminal?

It looks like you still need Calibre GUI to add books- this is read-only interface.

I was hoping that this could replace my Google Drive folder with various papers on interesting topics I'd like to read.

They have also made Calibre look a little less crappy on high definition screens, and added a conversion to .docx: https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve

So glad about this, it always looked terrible on any Macs as it wasn't really designed with 2.5K-5K screens in mind.

I've been using Google Play Books as a way to keep my books in the cloud, ready and available. Looking forward to seeing how Calibre works in comparison- hopefully much greater control, with similar functionality.

Having tried to set this up, it's a neat idea, but needs a lot more work before it's ready. Can't logout users, poor interface design, a bunch of JS errors when just trying to load a book (immediate request timeouts, incorrect paths, trying to access missing objects, non-working buttons, etc).

I hope it gets better though, because it's a great concept

EDIT: also, the forums aren't letting me register due to an error in their captcha being broken, so I can't discuss/submit my bugs there.

EDIT2: I was able submit a bug report to lanuchpad.

I love Calibre and contribute recipe updates often but don't really see the value of the server. I script things to download via command line and then send to kindle over email. It's more robust than the front end and less hassle than running a server you have to use the browser to access. Given file sizes are small (this week's Economist is about 15mb) it's perfectly Fine to us email.

One guy further up the thread has 350mb ebooks

There are people who have 200GB of books (non-fiction only so none of the fiction books that seem to come out at an alarming rate every day)

Books that are 350MB individually*

Many comic books from recent humble bundles have been around that size, for example.

I am having a bad day understanding comments.

I use a docker container called CalibreWeb to view my Calibre library on any device. This is useful because I also read comics and Image sends me a .cbz file that I can put into Calibre then download via web to Chunky. The other cool things that the container I use does is set up accouts so it can just email me or my family directly to our kindles. It is wonderful. I will be checking out the built in server because it lets you edit metadata. If I can do that without having to go to my TV which acts as my servef monitor and am able to do it at a desk, I will be STOKED.

I personally just use iBooks as my personal content server / ebook reader. Get your epubs somehow and drag & drop to iBooks. It syncs with all of your devices whiles using your iCloud account. It's very easy, and I've found iBooks the nicest ebook reader yet.

I like it better than amazon's kindle apps and you can use an open format.

Semi-related: I wrote a fb messenger bot [1] which can send any ebooks (including epub) to your kindle.

It's handy if you've only got access to an epub, and a bit less clunky than sending via email.

[1] https://m.me/kindleebooksender

Just so you're aware, I added it and Messenger automatically sent the "Get Started" text, and the typing animation ran for about 30 seconds until it stopped with nothing happening.

Huh that's weird. I'm looking at the logs, and this is the first time that's ever happened. It will usually just spit out the following introductory text:

  Hi there! Send me your ebooks and I'll send them to your Kindle.
  To get started, I'll need you to first tell me your Kindle's email address.
  This can be found on your Kindle management page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage?ie=UTF8#pdocSettings

  (ending with @kindle.com)

Will look into this, thanks!

I'm not on messenger but that's pretty cool. Is it one at a time? What's the upload limit?

You can upload as many files as you want in one go.

No limit on the number of ebooks you can send, but the max size for any one file is ~20MB

can someone tell (test) for me if calibre server serves to a console browser such as elinks ?

Thanks

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