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 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 conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:
Announcement
📢 A note on where things stand
ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.
That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That’s the whole point of open source.
So here’s what’s happening next:
A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you’ve been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.
We’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from everything this community has already built together.
If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: 👉 https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk
More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That’s exactly why it’s worth continuing.
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)?
First off, I started self hosting about a year or so ago so I’m not an expert. However, I decided to migrate a couple of my books from CWA to both Komga and Kavita so I could compare and reply to you. That led me down a rabbit hole of error messages and I was ready to tell you to just use CWA. But it was user error due to corrupted files lol. After getting that sorted, I’ve come to the conclution that Komga and Kavita are nearly identical. The only difference I could see is, IMO, Kavita is prettier. But they both manage their files roughly the same and if you have the metadata in a .opf inside the same folder as the epub both will pull the metadata with no additional config needed. TBH, Kavita looks better to me. However, Komga has a better web reader IMO. Sometimes with Kavitas web reader I have to change the view settings to scroll rather than columns because it bugs and doesn’t continue to the next page. Whereas I haven’t had that issue with Komga. If you just want a virtural library to download your books off of, then I would recommend Kavita because of it’s UI. However, if you’re planning on mostly using the web reader, I would recommend Komga. Hopefully that was helpful.
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.