I would like to start managing ebooks and manga properly. I don’t have many, but I plan on increasing my collection. My requirements are not so strict, I don’t mind getting the books/manga myself, but I am also curious about setting up LazyLibrarian at one point, is it worth it? (I already have other *arrs installed on my server). I had similar thoughts about Suwayomi.

My confusion starts from the accessories around all this: Calibre, CalibreWeb/Automated, Komga, Kavita, Audiobookshelf, etc. Does having a Kindle as reading device limits my possibilities to use any of these? Is setting up e.g. both CalibreWeb and Kavita redundant?

I guess my question is how is everyone using these services for their own library :)

  • Deebster@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    5 months ago

    Ebooks: I use Calibre locally and Calibre-web on the server (read-only metadata db, I overwrite with the Calibre version as tagging, etc is far easier on desktop).

    You can connect Koreader to Calibre-web and until maybe a fortnight ago you could jailbreak a Kindle and use Koreader instead of the default software. Now you’ll need to manually move files over, or use the email-to-Kindle option (probably a bad idea, but I expect Amazon can tell if you’ve side loaded pirated content anyway). Nowadays I buy from not-Amazon sources, strip any DRM and send it over.

    Manga/comics/graphic novels: I use Kavita on the server and I use comictagger on desktop to fix the metadata.

    I’m happy to use different set ups for the different types as they’re quite different experiences and specialist tools work better.

        • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
          1·
          5 months ago

          Just to be clear, I’m pretty sure that they don’t have a no-DRM-across-the-board policy, though, so if you’re going there for DRM-free ebooks, you probably want to pay attention to what you’re buying.

          checks

          Yeah, they have a specific category for DRM-free ebooks:

          https://www.kobo.com/us/en/p/drm-free

          I’ll also add that independent of their store, I rather like their hardware e-readers, have used them in the past, and if I wasn’t trying to put a cap on how many electronic devices I haul around and wanted a dedicated e-reader, the Kobo devices would probably be pretty high on my list. When I used them, I just loaded my own content onto them with Calibre, not stuff from the Kobo store.