Has anybody experienced with running calibre-web + kavita (or another combination of ebook oriented services) combined? I’m asking because none seem to be the definite winner (calibre is fugly, but you can upload books, kavita is nice but opinionated, etc). Any experience on that regard?
TLDR: Ubooquity is king imo for in-browser reading. Kavita is simple & looks good. Calibre + Calibre Web is most advanced
Calibre + calibre web is the best combination. Calibre itself is very powerful and Calibreweb makes it fine to look at. I had 2 issues that pushed me away from Calibre. First is that my ebook library isn’t in the “Calibre” format, so I’d have to import all my ebooks … which essentially copies them to another directory in the layout Calibre wants. Ik know ebooks don’t take up much space but i don’t need a duplicate of the entire library. Second (in line with the first) is that i don’t want to import every new book manually so that Calibre can interact with it.
Currently I run Kavita and don’t have any issues with it. It works fine, and looks good. Not sure what features you are looking for, but i feel most of peoples needs are satisfied by Kavita.
I will say, i don’t read books directly through these services. For that I use (and absolutely love) Ubooquity. I use Kavita to easily send books to my Kindle. If that is also your use case you’ll have to set up the email stuff which can be annoying but is well worth the effort.
Jesus fuck. I have been looking for something like Kavita for so long now, specifically because of the issues you outlined with Calibre wanting to duplicate my library. I have thousands to tens of thousands of PDFs I’ve needed to get organized for so long and duplicating it all is not feasible (plus Calibre’s interface just looks 20 years out of date). I just got Kavita loaded and scanning my library and my initial impression is that this will do everything I’ve been wanting for so long. Thanks for the tip!
Confused as to what the question is, are you looking for an idea as to which ebook platform is the most usable? In my experience (between Calibre & Komga) Calibre is the champion, its not the one people talk about all the time for nothing
I’m not into ebooks that much and don’t have experience with them. I still prefer paper. I’ve just been totally put off by all the bad stuff I’ve read about DRM etc. Is it really a problem and how do these tools that you mention above cope with them. I’m one of those that often annotates with pencil in the books I read. Can you annotate DRM protected content with Open Source tools?
I wish the answer wasn’t calibre + calibre-web.
I’ve tried several times to make Kavita work but it will take a lot of work to make it usable for epubs. It’s amazing for visual media to be fair.
Calibre is awful in almost every way, including the source code, but it’s still the best which is kind of depressing.
EDIT: Linuxservers has a nice container image that runs calibre in vnc and runs calibre-web at the same time so you can have it centrally available without a desktop involved.
