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Comment by Foltos | Hacker News Reader

I throw all documents into Calibre [1]. It can extract metadata from files and extend them from online sources. It has a lot of related plugins too. As a plus it can convert to make the document book reader friendly. There are web applications capable of reading calibres meta-data files and allowing to share the library.

1: https://calibre-ebook.com/

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I want to host a Calibre server somewhere in the cloud but not spend more than a $1 or two per month to do it. Anyone done this?

There's cheap VPS hosts, but the problem is that they all go away after a year and pop up with a new name after that.

Maybe the 3.50$ instance would do the job: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

Calibre Web, running on a Raspberry Pi. It comes with login, you can use Github to login too. Expose it via your router (put Nginx+LE in front) or cloudflared.

I just put my Calibre library in Dropbox and get apps like Calibre Sync for Android. It integrates with Dropbox, downloads the library metadata on demand, and lets you download the books you are actually reading.

I combine this with sorting by recently modified/custom Calibre columns for managing what is Todo or various 'shelves'. It lets you make a custom 'tag' column.

Does this also let you sync annotations? My gut feeling is no but you seem smarter than me.

Yep I just let Calibre do it. It's generally smarter at this stuff than I probably am.

With the GetFileName plugin if you like to preserve the original filename.

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