According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app that for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflict about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Oh goddamn it, I deployed this like five days ago. Been working on digitizing my whole collection for the past week cuz I liked it so much. Fuck lol.
Uh, anyone know any good alternatives???
Have you read the post? Just wait for the new repo
Yes, friend, I read the post. But frankly I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, particularly considering how shit went down with Booklore.
I joined the new discord, and will make a donation once there’s a means to do so, but I’m not sure how long it will take them to get something up and running. The original dev also joined their discord and immediately started talking shit to everyone in there, so that was interesting. And the mods there also asked for logo ideas, and it pretty quickly devolved into an AI slop fest, which was disappointing. So. We’ll see how it goes.
On my server I have Calibre Web Automated, Komga, and Kavita setup. I started with CWA for epubs and it’s been pretty great especially for syncing metadata that, with the recent update, has gotten better. The downside I’ve had is with comics. It supports them but there’s currently no support for writing metadata for .cbr or .cbz so trying to sync or update metadata errors out. Sometimes it saves it, but a lot of the time it errors out for me. Which is why I spun up Komga and Kavita. They’re both good for comics, manga, and books. Plus the UI on both is nice. However, they both don’t sync metadata as well as CWA. I think there’s another container you can create to write metadata for Komga and Kavita, but I had no luck with it. Eventually I’ll decide on just one, but so far, I’m undecided on which one I like the most.
I’ve been using Calibre (not the web version tho) to fetch metadata and better covers and create .opf files before I upload to my server anyway. Kavita’s documentation says it will import metadata from an opf in the same folder, so it should work out of the box, yes?
Honestly Calibre has a LOT of features that I don’t ever use, which is why I wasn’t planning on running CWA. I don’t have any comics, but between Komga and Kavita, which would you say is better for books (most of mine are epub format)?
What’s the work flow life for CWA? I currently use calibre-web (kobosync) and calibre to organize and polish then drag and drop the epubs to calibre-web. There has to be a better way lol
I’ve never used Calibre-web so I wouldn’t know the difference but Calibre Web Automated is supposed to be a blend of Calibre and Calibre-Web. I don’t run a calibre server at home anymore because it wasn’t needed after implementing CWA. I did have to copy some Calibre files to run the CWA container (it’s in the setup doc) but I haven’t needed Calibre since setting up CWA. Whenever I get more books I move the files to the “booksync” folder and it uploads it to CWA. You can also upload them via the webpage. The downside, I usually have to manually fetch the metadata for the books. But that’s not a big deal to me. At least I can do everything in one place. I think CWA supports CW plugins, but I’m not 100% certain. I would recommend it if you’re looking for one place to hold and update your books metadata.
https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita maybe?