I’ve been a Readarr user with two instances(ebooks, and audiobooks) for a long time now. But more and more often, files get unlinked in the database making it less and less useful as a way to track what books I have vs “wanted,” which is my main use case.
I’ve been trying to convert to LazyLibrarian, but boy people weren’t exaggerating when they said the configuration is unclear. Unfortunately the docs do not clear it up. Interesting I’m what y’all are doing!
Calibre Web Automated and Ephemera. But looking to switch to Booklore some day,just haven’t had the time.
What’s Ephemera? I haven’t heard of it before.
I’ve checked out Booklore before, but Calibre-web-automated + calibre has been working well. The feature this is missing, and the feature from Readarr I use, is a “wanted” list.
Basically a book downloader that connects to various sources, mainly Annas archive, and then hands the downloads over to CWA(or booklore). While still heavily under development it works.
I just use calibre locally. What are the benefits of using something server-based? Can you sync books to your ereaders?
We use calibre-web-automated and have Kobo’s that we can sync with it. It’s fantastic.
That sounds awesome! How do you sync to the Kobo?
I followed this guide! https://jccpalmer.com/posts/setting-up-kobo-sync-with-calibre-web/
As in sync position wirelessly ?? that would rock.
Yes! Its so good. I followed this guide. https://jccpalmer.com/posts/setting-up-kobo-sync-with-calibre-web/
Both my wife and I have our own devices and they sync really well.
Oh Boy, Oh Boy, Oh Boy !!
Thanks for the link, that’s so happening.
Not a problem! It’s been great, I just had to make sure I was converting the books to kepub beforehand!
Other than it being convenient to access your books from multiple machines, a big feature of a server based solution is for my wife to download what she wants from our library.
Is that an issue though ? I have about 100 books on my Kobo and so does my parter on her Kindle (that never uses wifi to connect to Amazon and when it does die will get a Kobo) , she jumps on Calibre infrequently to say the least. Then dumps abother 50 books on. Calibre Library is on a tiny portable nvme (backed up to a HDD) that can be used on her laptop or my desktop.
I also use my local libray via wifi (anywhere) for loaner books.on the kobo but so many books on my nvme I’m overwhelmed…and i walk to my local actual library around the corner once a month to make sure its still there as a valuable tool and there’s still something to browsing past dead trees.
I mean, it’s not an issue, but it has been fun to build out and use. We’re also going to the library in town just about weekly, so the service may be overkill if you don’t want it.
Manually downloading and moving stuff around in folders, babeh!
Tho i do use this for audiobooks: https://codeberg.org/banankungen/absort
But it only works for english language audiobooks that exist on audible, so not for all use cases.
This is cool, thanks for sharing!
A MaM account, a bash script that qbittorrent runs after it finishes a torrent and calibre-web-automated. I know there is some download automatic cwa plugins I just haven’t bothered.
What’s your bash script doing? Moving and renaming files into the proper format/location?
It checks to see if there are duplicate files and only moves over the .epub if it exists. If there is no epub then it moves over the .mobi or the az3w file since those are the big ones. that usually get downloaded.
I’m gonna be honest, I wasn’t using Readarr before it was depreciated. I didn’t like how it would add every book by an author and clog up the dashboard.
I’ve always just used Prowlarr to fetch whatever book I wanted from MAM and import automatically it into Kavita.
That’s a fair POV. Readarr has never been the dashboard for me, rather a maintained list of “wanted” books.
Are you telling Prowlarr to snag individual books as you come across them?
Still using readarr, with rreading glasses metadata
Watching the development of chaptarr and waiting for it to be ready for a daily driver
This is where I’m at too. Mostly just to handle download processing in a better way, most of my searches are still manual but I’m trying to be ready for the chaptarr release.
Running calibre with some stuff to auto convert to kepub and calibre web for Kobo sync.
Finally getting around to setting up a reverse proxy this weekend.
Any good ways of getting the Kobo sync working externally?
The closest I have is setting up a small single board computer as a vpn tunnel that your kobo can connect to, but I haven’t been that much in need. (Tunnel to home, then the kobo thinks it’s home and all is good)
I don’t want to punch a hole in my network that isn’t secured in some way for the kobo.
*drivarr, surely.
That’s where I am! RReading glasses has been great for lookup, but Readarr regularly losing track of files and failing to manually reattach them is exceedingly annoying.
What do you make of the rreading glasses developer not endorsing chaptarr?
I use a combination of calibre-web-automated for metadata management and calibre-web-automated-book-downloader for downloading from Anna’s Archive. Book read progress and status is synced from my Kobo.
It works really well but you need to manually request books one at a time. The readarr feature I miss was the ability to subscribe to a GoodReads list.
Can calibre-web-automated handle the metadata look-up? I’m using it as my web frontend for serving books.
I don’t mind going and finding individual books from IRC or other sources, but being able to subscribe to a centralized, “I want to read this” list is the feature I’m looking to replace at the end of the day.
I’m not sure if it automatically does the metadata lookup or if it just reads embedded metadata from the epubs I’ve downloaded. It for sure does a poor job of setting up the series name and book number fields if you read a lot of series.





