My e-book management currently consist of storing a bunch of files, both .epub, .pdf and .azw3 stored either by author (fiction) or by topic (non-fiction), for various sources (purchased e-books, downloaded via University subscriptions, Project Guthenberg and some from Library Genesis/Anna’s Archive). For some time I’d been wanting to organize them better, with a web UI to download in a format of my choice and to be able to share with others.

I first found out about and became interested in Booklore, as it seemed to fulfill my needs, and decided to research it more in-depth and oh boy, what drama… I am aware of the Grimmory fork, but I am not touching that with a ten-foot pole until it has matured and can be generally considered to be trustworthy.

So instead I started experimenting with the more established Calibre + Calibre-Web setup (I decided against Calibre Web Automated, as that also seemed a little shady). I find the UI of Calibre-Web to be fine enough for my use, but would have loved to be able to edit more metadata in the UI (it appears I am unable to add a cover for instance). But the Calibre server has so far been very frustrating to work with for me, and does not fit my desired workflow at all. I basically want to be able to dump my files onto my server (and continuously sync local files to the sever), get the metadata mostly automatically sorted with easy options to amend missing metadata (preferably from a web UI and not that screen-share thing that doesn’t even work in Librewolf). I have not found a way for it to automatically import new books, and if I reimport from the directory I dump my books in, it will reimport some of the books where the metadata was changed (some it will realize is the same, and ask to skip), so I end up with multiple duplicates. I work under the assumption that its mostly user errors so far, and I will try to master it better, but so far I find it very intuitive.

I will be looking more into Kavita as well, but so far I know very little about it.

How are you setup in your homelab for e-book management? Would love to see some examples of well-established workflows that works for you.