Hello fellow self-hosters. I’m currently self-hosting the servarr stack, including jellyseer, radarr/sonarr, prowlarr transmission, and jellyfin. It works great.

I now want to expand my system into ebooks as well. I have readarr already set up, but it is too complicated for my wife. I’ve also tried calibre, which is great for ebook management,and Kavita, which is a lovely ebook server and reader. But I’m looking for something like “jellyseer for ebooks” that shows what’s currently popular and makes it easy for the user to make requests and have those requests sent to an automated backend for downloading. Additionally, it should work well from a phone, and it would be ideal if it could download from Library Genesis.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.

  • @brandonEnglish
    3•7 months ago

    I prefer LazyLibrarian over Readarr but it still leaves a lot to be desired for end-user usability. One of the big issues with ebooks is that data is a mess, with each book having a billion different editions with spotty metadata support that makes it hard to tell what is what.

    Goodreads seems like it was a decent source of data for these types of projects but they shut off new API access a couple years ago and legacy access can go away at any moment. Hardcover seems like a promising API alternative but not sure if anyone has started integrating with them yet. Manga and comics seem to be in a better state, with a more rabid fanbase maintaining data but still nowhere near what’s available for movies and tv.

    • @sailingbytheleeOPEnglish
      1•7 months ago

      I didn’t realize that the metadata was in such a bad state. But that would explain why I’m having difficulty finding the ebook equivalent of the smooth Jellyseer/Sonarr/Jellyfin ecosystem. Thanks for the insight.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•7 months ago

      Have you tried using Calibre with Readarr? You use Readarr and the request tool then you can tell Readarr to use Calibre to manipulate the library. I find that this does a fantastic job of sorting out all of my ebooks with all their editions and naming conventions.

      • @brandonEnglish
        2•7 months ago

        I have, and use Calibre with LL instead and it still requires a lot of hand holding and manual grooming to get a clean library.

        My big issue with Readarr is that it had a hard time fetching data for various popular and/or prolific authors. So if I wanted to fetch all the books for a particular author, there was a high likelihood it wouldn’t actually fetch the necessary book data to do so.