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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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I would really love a version of Calibre that ran in a web browser instead of a desktop app
Can you give a specific reason?
I feel that I'm usually more upset that apps choose electron and I have performance issue because they didn't spend time writing a proper lightweight desktop application. I feel like Calibre is actually one of those apps.
I could see portability across devices being useful but is the Calibre interface really going to be conducive for that?
All the other services I have running are on a server in my closet, which I access with a web browser from other devices. Calibre needing to run on my workstation is a big shift in that workflow. Especially because all the rest of my media is sitting on that server.
Also, UX of open source desktop apps is… lacking. They don’t look good, and they don’t feel good to use. But that might be because I’m picky and spoiled by decades of using a Mac.
I definitely don’t want more Electron apps. About the only things I want to run locally is a browser, a text editor, and a terminal.
That's fair but I think one of the most critical features of Calibre for me is interfacing with my e-reader over USB to download/upload my epubs. I don't know how that would work from a Browser app.
What about https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web?
I tried that but you need a Calibre library first, and that requires using Calibre AFAIK
It's unnecessarily annoying to set up, as the other user pointed out. But it can be set up by itself using https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre-web docker, and used standalone. The only trick is needing an empty database.
Can you explain bit more please. I have calibre-web running, downloaded empty database, added some books in the same folder as database, but nothing is showing up in calibre-web gui. Did I miss something?
You can just create an empty calibre library using the desktop app and then import everything from the web UI.
Calibre-web even links an empty database in their readme so you can do exactly that without the desktop app.
So you want an entirely different app then. The desktop app would have to be completely rewritten.
I would like the ability to do a CLI-only build since I only really use the
ebook-convertcommand. Never felt the need to "manage" my ebooks.While it isn't a perfect solution, you can run calibre-server and only close it to open the GUI when you need to convert.
Yeah, I ended up doing something similar but using my own Dockerfile where I specified
ebook-convertas the entry point.I'm running Calibre on the web using https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre
Solved?
You can use Podman too, if that would be a problem.
Look at StirlingPDF if you want an example how to run OR are interested in a great web-UI PDF editor based off various open sourc tools, in a single interface
StirlingPDF is freaking awesome, although I don't know how it relates to the post.
https://docs.linuxserver.io/images/docker-calibre
Run this in a docker container which exposes a vnc-style web interface.
That's still not what I'm looking for. What's wrong with good old HTML?
Another user posted a link to Calibre-Web in this thread and I would def use that instead of this.
They are just trying to help, nothing wrong with html.
There was somebody on the Linux reddit with a self hostable ebook app just a week or so. It looked slick but wasn't really that useful for me. Might be worth a look.
That docker image does have a basic web interface as well, but it's limited to adding, downloading, and editing the metadata of single files.
COPS is cool too but it's only a download interface.