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 :)
I went through essentially the same thing a couple months ago. Tried Calibre (and Calibre server) since everyone recommended it.
Really disliked it. Calibre is great for converting ebooks, but has shit management and webserving capabilities.
I ended up with Kavita and am super happy. On the web client, both management and actual reading are a pleasure. Any phone/tablet client supporting OPDS works perfectly to read/download your manga/books from the server.
And a select few clients go a step further, supporting Kavita’s API, which allows for 2-way sync (effectively, syncing reading progress between all your devices).
Do you have any client recommendations? I’ve tried Kavita and I liked the web app, but having a dedicated 2-way syncing client would be nice!
For manga, I’ve found Mihon to be nicest, by far, and it supports the API. For books, I am currently “stuck” on koreader on Android (which “only” supports OPDS-PS). I do most of my reading on a reMarkable currently, and that has no supporting client. Writing one is on my to-do list, but it’s a bit daunting of a task…
Here is a pretty good list of what is supported where.
Mihon is great right up until you’re trying to read ultra high quality manga with screentones. Mihon doesn’t have modern scaling algorithms, so anything significantly larger than your screen resolution will moiré like crazy.
That seems nice, thanks for sharing! I read Kavita has some weird requirements for path organization for it to work correctly, or do I remember wrong? Do you also do metadata editing in Kavita itself?
Haven’t had any issues in that regard, so can’t really say, sorry. I have two folders (Mangas and ebooks) on my NAS, and in Kavita, created a library for each.
You absolutely can edit metadata, although I personally haven’t had the need yet. I use readarr and suwayomi for “obtaining” books and manga, respectively, and what they come up with is usually just fine.
Nice, thanks for the details :) Suwayomi usually obtains png as far as I remember, is Kavita able to read anything that Suwayomi gets, without issues or post-processing needed? Sorry for the many questions^^
I think I have set Suwayomi to download / convert to CZB, not for Kavita specifically, but because a lot of reader apps cannot handle loose images
Thanks, that’s all I needed to know :)