3 Self Hosted E-Book Hosts and Readers
Read your e-book collection anywhere with one of these self hosted e-book hosts and reader platforms. 📚
With audio books on the rise, are e-books still a favorite among the self hosted crowd? I'll let you decide but here's what I dug up when researching for self hosted e-book solutions. There's not many choices, however these three options are among the best I found.
PyShelf
Other solutions require you to have access to an X server to at the very least generate your book database, pyShelf doesnt. We aim to provide a fully featured e-book server with minimal requirements, and no reliance on X whatsoever.
Terminal based e-book server. Open source & Lightweight.
th3r00tCalibre-Web
Calibre-Web is a web app providing a clean interface for browsing, reading and downloading e-Books using a valid Calibre database.
Calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager. Users say it’s outstanding and a must-have. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s also completely free and open source and great for both casual users and computer experts. Calibre supports file converting and syncing to kindle devices and nearly all e-reader devices.
janeczkuKavita
Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform reading server. Built with a focus for manga, and the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your reading collection with your friends and family!
Lighting fast with a slick design, Kavita is a rocket fueled self-hosted digital library which supports a vast array of file formats. Install to start reading and share your server with your friends.
KareaditaFinal Notes and Thoughts
It seems the most popular e-book server option is Calibre. It supports nearly every e-reader and can convert books into other formats. While the design has much to be disred and the Calibre website looks like it came out of the 90's, the features Calibre has are second to none over the other options.
Each option above can be installed via Docker to make for an easy deployment. Maintaining and managing the container is simple and effective for those running services like these on virtual machines or LXC in Proxmox.
Personally, I don't read e-books, but I do like and enjoy reading comincs from time to time. But that is a whole other ball of wax and a article on it's own. Perhaps you will see that soon here on Noted!
If you found any of the projects above useful, be sure to star ⭐ the Github repo!
Jeremy
