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Comment by pathartl | Hacker News Reader

Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion.

Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...

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> [Calibre] never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era

Could you explain that in more detail? It seems to me that Calibre is totally self hosted.

I give an example. I use Calibre to import ebooks as epub (if they are not already epub, which they usually are,) maybe change their metadata and add a cover if they don't have one. The books go to Calibre's directory and then I sync to my phone using syncthing, like everything else I exchange between my laptop and my phone. I know that Calibre has a way to send books to devices but I think that it requires either a hardware reader or some interoperable app. I prefer working only with the file system. It always works no matter what I have on my phone.

All of that seems self hosted to me, or do you mean having a server somewhere at home or on the internet with the ebook collection?

I also use the editor to fix typos or to create ebooks from text files.

The content server is fine, but it's the managing of the library that is done in the desktop application. I have a home server that I use to host Jellyfin and such, and Calibre is the one application that wasn't really built to be managed from a web interface. In fact, the Docker container I use basically pipes an X11 environment to a VNC web client.

>All of that seems self hosted to me, or do you mean having a server somewhere at home or on the internet with the ebook collection?

I''m not the person you replied to, but having it run on a server somewhere is exactly what "self hosted" means to me.

So maybe https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html even if it seems that the database must be on the same machine the UI runs on, or be copied to a server with all the books. That could be the criticism of the parent post.

Do you mean viewing multiple libraries at once? What would be the benefit of that over having one library with saved filter views?

I did once have segregated Calibre libraries. One for cookbooks, one for technical books in PDF and one for 'regular' books like novels and nonfiction in EPUB.

The only reason I had it like that was so I could sync just the cookbook files to another device via Syncthing, or only the technical books. It didn't last, it was a pita to manager (three different auto-add folders) and I reunified them after 9 months or so.

Being able to switch between multiple libraries under one application, and being able to assign those libraries based on a logged on user is sort of what I'm talking about. My partner and I have two very different tastes in books, and managing them under one library is a pain.

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