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Comment by robbiet480 | Hacker News Reader

For someone looking for a bit more than this, I recently got Bookorbit running and its quite powerful for being so young. https://bookorbit.app/

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I had a look at BookOrbit not long ago. Love the fact that it is able to manage all book types (manga, comics, ebooks). Perfect for me and have been struggling to find a good tool that does all of them without being stupid heavy in resources. Once I looked at the repo, source, PRs etc. I noticed how heavy AI use is. This feels purely vibecoded without much for understanding what is actually being delivered. So ended up not using.

Why not use Kavita then? It uses even less resources, it's mature (nearly 5 years old) and supports manga/comics/ebooks with a rich ecosystem of apps (esp with AI now, lots of users are creating mobile apps to connect).

I’m a huge fan of bookorbit, especially when paired with KOReader. It’s been, bar none, the best reading experience. I love having my highlights saved in software I control and can do whatever I want with. Currently I have multiple e-ink displays around my house that rotate a book quote from my highlights once a day. I love seeing the highlights and I love knowing the whole pipeline is open source.

I moved from Grimmory to BookOrbit due to the lower resource usage and absolutely love it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1tqia6s/i_bench...

Have you done calibre web or others? How does it compare?

I haven't spent much time with calibre-web in a long time but can confidently say BookOrbit blows it out of the water in terms of functionality. I love that I can have one app that handles books and audiobooks. The ecosystem of apps that work with it is growing quick too, Apogee for iOS being a standout for me. They recently added readaloud support (like Amazon Whispersync or Storyteller) natively in the app, which I've never seen done before.

I have no relation to BookOrbit except I'm a very happy user.

I don't think calibreweb is that old, are you thinking of the calibre webserver?

The storyteller mobile apps have supported readaloud for years. You can even set different playback speeds for readaloud vs listening, so when you background the app or lock your phone screen, it will switch from the readaloud speed to the listening speed. I typically use like 2.25x for readaloud and 1.5x for listening.

Yes they have, but they didn't have the ability to align a book _on device_ like Apogee does. It just listens for a few seconds of audio to find where you are in the book and then aligns automatically going forward without having to pre-process.

Could you link to this Apogee app? i'm interested to see other apps in the space.

On-device alignment is coming in Storyteller v3 apps.

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