Ubooquity: Free home server for your comics and ebooks library | Hacker News Reader

Ubooquity: Free home server for your comics and ebooks library

vaemendis.net

73 pointsingve23 comments

I know lots of people use Calibre, but I find it fussy and don't like how it organizes things in the library interface. I've been using Ubooquity instead and it's pretty drop-dead simple to use and I like the web-reader more, especially on tablets.

1) Start the application

2) Tell it where your stuff is

3) Wait while it indexes it (it does not replicate your content into a book index just grabs front pages for thumbnails)

4) Go to the server address:port with whatever browser.

It really works well if you organize your reading material by folders as Ubooquity simply uses that in the application.

It works really brilliantly on the kinds of full-page-image books you might find on the Internet Archive.

Does it have a feature to import books from the Internet Archive when provided an item link? Killer feature imho.

No, I wish it did. I've spoken with the author and he's pretty adamant at keeping it really focused and keeping out any feature creep. Instead he's just fixing bugs and doing some performance updates.

Instead I just download the PDF from IA into the folder where it should be and tell Ubooquity to rescan the books it's managing and voila!

I put all my books into a Calibre library on Dropbox and open them in Apple Books via files or CC. Does ubooquity offer something more?

I’m missing something that can markup on PDFs and highlights/notes on epubs dont sync back to the original file because iBooks has it’s own copy. But I haven’t found a clear solution to this yet - one app that supports reading both PDF and epub and will sync annotations back into the file or a server. Send me recommendations please! Can ubooquity help here?

For PDFs, I use Documents by Readdle on iPad. Great for the markup and includes syncing (files accessible offline). Lots of options for the latter (OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud, I use WebDAV), although syncing is a pain because you have to keep the app open (it seems to be an iOS limitation).

For EPUBs, sadly, it doesn’t do highlight... for this I think you could use Marvin, which can read from a Calibre Server.

Thanks~ I'm using Marvin now and its great. Hits almost all my checkboxes for a reader.

Cool solution, however, what does CC stand for?

Calibre companion. It’s an iOS app that i can point to a Calibre lib in Dropbox and browse/import into iBooks. It’s nicer than going through the files app because it can read the calibre DB.

Can CC read a Calibre DB and ebooks out of Files/iCloud Drive?

How's this different from Calibre web UI?

For me I used it over Calibre for the simple feature of being able to just drop ebooks in a directory, and have them added to the library automatically.

A watch folder is a feature of Calibre as well.

Of Calibre yes, but not of Calibre Web. I don't want to have to create a database, and move it to web for it to work.

I find it sad that we need a specific software for ebook hosting. Couldn't we find a solution that doesn't require a special server for hosting each file type? Then front-end plug into that?

This sounds a lot like a file system.

We can probably blame Apple for that; there are basically no good solutions to getting your comic / eBook collection on to the iPad.

No pun intended but the solution there is to buy an alternative tablet or device.

Agreeing with your main point: Apple does not provide a great solution for ebook library management and sync to iOS.

But there are good third-party options.

I recommend Kybook 3 on iOS for ebooks. OPDS sync from Calibre works well.

I only have occasional use for an iOS CBR/CBZ reader, but ComicFlow has worked for me, without any memorable problems.

That’s not an iPad problem, it’s an app problem. And there are tons of iOS apps that have solved that problem.

Nextcloud is exactly this.

My exact thought reading the link, there's plenty of ebook reader apps for nextcloud. It may even work out of the box, I'm not sure.

Same goes for most formats you can imagine, overseas family puts up lengthy holiday videos on my server and nearly everyone just watches it in the browser.

Ubooquity 2.1.2 released on 11 october 2018 Ubooquity 2.1.1 released on 22 september 2017

Seems like a good release cadence for stable software. Pity they don't list the changelog on the same page.

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