Honestly, I’m personally not just after a self hosting solution, I’m mostly trying to replace US services and companies. As part of that, I’ve started using Jellyfin and I think it’s great but the book library part is a bit clunky.
I think I’ve got three use cases:
- Research papers
- Textbooks
- Novels / Non-fiction
I’m okay with three separate setups for these too. I do listen to quite a few audiobooks but they’re currently independent and I’m happy to keep it that way. I’m happy to hear integrated solutions, or suggestions for an audio book library, but this post is focused on the above list.
The main device I’d do most of my reading on is an iPhone but I’d also be wanting to open up the research papers and textbooks on my MacBook. I’d want to be able to add research papers from the iPhone, or at least a light weight way to list them to quickly add later.
Note taking and highlighting isn’t an issue, I’ve started using markdown for this. Syncing how much of the book I’ve read is. Ideally between devices but on the one device would work too.
I figure I’ll have to drop some of my aims here but I thought I’d see if anyone knows of decent setups to try. Neither Jellyfin or Calibre seem amazing but maybe I could just configure them better.
Since there is a mandated image here I’m starting to wonder if I’m really in the wrong place, but I put textbook cover there
The devs are also pretty responsive to bug reports!
I will say that they themselves have mentioned that there is kind of a limit in library size because the project is meant to serve “small to modest personal libraries” but I think it was ranked as a few thousand, so that won’t be a problem for most people I think.
A few thousand means ?
I have 11000 ebooks on Calibre and am looking at alternatives.
I believe the numbers I saw were about 3-5k, so it might not handle your collection well. However, I encourage you to check their github to confirm rather than just go off my vague recollection alone.