I really wish there was a plex for ebooks where I could just throw epubs on my server and read on kobo ereader, iphone, web, mac/windows native, etc and just not think about it. Would also be nice to have actually decent stats tracking and an anki like spaced repetition for any words i looked up in the app while reading. There are some sort of attempts it this but it all falls down with anything resembling saemless ereader support. For some odd reason there seems to be no overlap into good UI design with most devs working on anything reader related. Been waiting a decade for something like this but seems there is just no such demand.
One important consideration is that unlike plex servers, it’s totally feasible to throw your entire library on a single device. Another important difference is that these devices are not pervasively connected to the Internet.
Koreader comes close, with comprehensive stats tracking and progress sync, but I absolutely would love to see SRS or stronger note taking or easier content management
Can confirm (for sharing; not so much for the reading stats, sorry). I run Calibre on my desktop; on desktops and laptops I use the content server for built-in online reading. For the Kobos in the house, they plug in and I click "Send to Device" for any new books. Kindles I hit "Send to Kindle" and it uses the email delivery system for it to magically appear on my Kindle. Androids and iPhones have myriad apps that will happily consumer Calibre's content server.
I keep the metadata up to date, strip Kindle DRM from the books I buy from Amazon, and maintain a giant personal DRM-free collection of books and comics (which Calibre also handles!). It's one of my favorite pieces of software.
One fun thing about Calibre is that the library is stored in a SQLite database. So, if you write a wrapper to parse that data, you don’t even need Calibre’s content server running!
I have the library stored on my NAS and am running a fairly simple Node.JS + Express + React web app on my Raspberry Pi that reads the database and provides web access this content.
Sadly, I don’t have the code in a publisher format as of yet.
One thing I’ve been meaning to do is add an upload feature so that I can have the web app add ebooks to the library. For now, I still have to fire up Calibre for that.
Edit: Wow, I just saw a post below for Calibre-Web. It’s the same thing I had been working on but it’s much much nicer than what I had hacked together!
I don't think I would want this over the git repo I currently use.
- I just sync the repo to get everything for offline use. Excellent offline access is x100 more valuable to me than anything a web interface could offer. Stats and Anki just feels like frippery.
- You get a web-interface to your repo if you do actually need to grab something online
- I store markdown notes and even diagrams alongside my books
- I edit the css in epub books if I don't like the fixed formatting they include so probably best to store a history of changes. It's quite fun becoming an editor to change an author's idiosyncratic spelling or chop out that "free chapter of another book" they added as an advert.
- I prefer a directory organisation of books - a media website things only impairs my access e.g. grepping all your books and notes together is just a minimum expectation for me.
I personally use Ubooquity for this. I can use the OPDS functionality to read it on Koreader on my Kobo, and can use the web interface to read it everywhere else.
From the screenshots on their site it seems to be a web app, both the reader and the admin. So you must be able to reach the server every time you are reading an ebook. Did you install Ubooquity on a server on the internet (a VPS?), do you have a public IP address at home, do you use a tunnel from home to a server on the internet? And what if you don't have internet connectivity?
I host a local server for a bunch of services, including Ubooquity. I do most of my reading on my Kobo, through Koreader, and as I use OPDS to fetch the books for it, I also have them locally and do not require internet access.
Not having internet connectivity is never a problem for me, the entire region where I live is completely covered by 4G.
Does OPDS support sending to the server the current position in a book? That's basically the only feature I would need a server for. Books are synced with Syncthing, no need for anything fancier than that. Of course the ebook reader must be able to send the position to the server when in the same network.
I'm also almost always in 4G coverage but there are planes, trains, mountains, tents in the middle of nowhere, etc. Apps that work offline are a safer choice.
Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) doesn't seem to include any tracking if how much you've read of a publication. So there doesn't seem like there would be any way to read across devices, which is something I too long for. https://drafts.opds.io/opds-2.0
Not quite what you're asking for, but I do have SyncThing sync all my ebooks to all my devices (phone, laptop, desktop) except my eink reader, and it's very nice! I've thought about trying to get SyncThing set up on a modded Remarkable or something to complete things. As a sibling pointed out, the files are small enough it's pretty easy to have the entire library on every device, and the peace of mind & convenience for planes, etc is wonderful.
I have a Boox and it's a surprising pain in the ass to just have it sync a folder. Not really an Android thing. You can use Syncthing or various third-party apps that sync a folder off Google Drive, but I'd like to just use Google Drive like on a desktop.
The closest thing I've seen to 'Plex for ebooks' is limited to manga/comics in .cbz/.cbr format: https://github.com/faldez/tanoshi . It's works reasonably well. Probably could be forked to add support for more general purpose reading use cases.
I've wanted SRS features as well but no ebook reader seems to do annotation exports well. I get by with Moon+ Reader and wrote a few Obsidian plugins to help me with parsing exports and generating flashcards. Would love to hear of better approaches.
KOReader with Calibre Content Server does handling the actual content. KOReader also has its own seperate sync feature. Don't think it'll do stats though.
Yeah I have messed with that in the past but KOReader doesn't have an iOS client so then forced to use the calibre server reader and it's all just not a fluid process. While I am thankful to have calibre as a tool it has always been a bit annoying to deal with for a few reasons: Feels completed bloated in terms of features and GUI, every time I open the app there is a update to be downloaded and no in app updates, the reader itself on desktops isn't that great, etc.
I get that I can sort of hack together some parts of what I want but really I want the Plex experience of once I have thrown an mp4 onto my server it is just a first class experience viewing and resuming on any device I own equivalent or better than media viewers from the likes of netflix, hbo, etc. I just want that same sort of experience with regards to eBooks, not a hacked together hodgepodge of homelab sync tools and configuration.
Koreader does awesome stats tracking into a SQLite database of every page you’ve read. You even get a calendar view for months showing what you’ve been reading.
I have a code snippet that can generate a Bookantt chart[1] from the koreader history DB. (On mobile, ping me if you’d be interested in me cleaning this up and releasing)
Last year, I tried several epub readers on a linux amd64 laptop. None was satisfying. All those that just wrapped chromium crashed with some epub files: that was the case for "Foliate", which was the inspiration for this "Alexandria" project. The Calibre reader was slow and unresponsive. Mupdf was fast and stable, but it lacked important features, like a table of contents. A Firefox plugin was okay, but its workflow was impractical.
I've since bought a e-ink device, so I don't read much on my laptop. When I do, I use Koreader. It's perfect for my Kobo device, and quite alright for a computer.
A couple of years back I tried Zathura, with the mupdf backend (if I remember correctly, this was the needed plugin for epub, so I also ditched the Poppler backend for PDF). I'm not a keyboard centric user, so couldn't get accustomed to it, but still think it works pretty well.
For those who haven't tried, Google Play Books is really good. It's free, cross-platform (plus web), you can upload epub, and syncs annotations across devices.
I switched from jailbroken Kindle to android e-ink device 3 years ago and I haven't looked back. It's the perfect combo.
Tip: Use Calibre to organize/backup your books and convert to epub
You can always dump your licenses from the web interface, pull down the books with the Adobe fulfillment software and then strip the DRM using calibre.
The problem with that reasoning is, it's not like Google is rolling a percentile die. They shut down projects that don't pay stockholder dividends, no matter how popular or widely used those projects are. So...
"shut down" seems a little strong since it was replaced with Youtube Music. For most users it was a UI change but otherwise they didn't even notice. This is very different from other products that were actually shut down where they just turned them off.
Yeah, it's also a better mobile app (at least in terms of not wasting screen real estate) than Apple Books on iOS. However some percentage of books I try to upload just give me an error and the app and web app rarely get any love.
Yeah. Margins are an important part of typography, but the "margins" of my phone include a bit of black bezel and some leather case. So text can get closer to the edges of the screen. And wasting phone screen real estate on the title or chapter name on each page is annoying. I'd rather have three extra lines of text.
Kind of, but the recent switch to the mupdf engine sacrificed what little layout customization it had for epubs. Now you can't even change the font anymore.
I have used a ton of ebook apps and have thoughts:
For me, the main thing that matters, particularly in a phone, is not wasting a ton of space. Margins do help readability. But the "margin" of your phone includes bezel, etc. Too-short lines of text drive me crazy and make me feel like my eyes are getting a workout.
Text-to-speech needs to be good. That means not speaking page and title numbers, working with the screen off, and turning pages properly with the screen off, such that it's easy to switch between reading the text and listening without losing your place. I have used apps that do text-to-speech but don't continue through the book, or only turn the page if the screen is kept on, etc. Also spoken words should be highlighted as they are spoken, if the screen is on.
Also on a small screen I much prefer ragged right to fully justified text. I also don't want a bunch of permanent on-screen chrome (tap in the center to reveal seems best); page-turning should be via a fast, simple "slide" animation; and the app needs to be able to override an ebook's font and spacing choices.
Cross-device syncing is nice as well. And this one is ridiculous but speed-reading modes are nice too, both through highlighting chunks of text and RSVP (one word or phrase at a time: Rapid Serial Visual Presentation).
I have tried numerous ereaders over the past few years, and nothing has ever come close to Foliate. It strikes the perfect balance between functionality and minimalism, or to put it in more concrete terms - it's very good at getting out of the way of reading. It has a fully immersive mode and is very customizable.
This Alexendria seems to be similar but is cross platform, so it will be worth giving a go.
Isn't being cross-platform, relatively modern-looking and open source already setting it apart from the current offerings?
There's great ones (like Foliate or Moon+) which are limited to one platform, there's ones that are cross-platform, but look so dated that I couldn't seriously use them for reading (like the one integrated in Calibre), and there's ones which are both fairly modern-looking and cross-platform, but not open source (like FBReader).
If this one syncs my books, reading positions, and highlights across my devices, that's gonna be a huge win in my book.
Hmm, that is odd about fbreader. I have the Debian package¹ installed that is Open Source², but looks like recent versions are no longer Open Source. Hadn't noticed that before.
Might also argue that nov.el³ is high quality and cross platform, but I'm not sure my definition of cross platform would necessarily align with other peoples ;)
That's perfectly okay that you cant see how it could look dated. If you wish to have a productive conversation you should probably open your eyes and look a bit broader, perhaps by not minimizing things to their absolute minimum and thinking about that. you reduce the entire UI/UX as "in a frame" because the rest of it is about the actual content and font, which are literally the most basic need that the rest of the discussion is what actually matters
The ebook reader on calibre is literally a frame with almost no border. There is nothing to discuss regarding UI/UX. There is nothing extraneous. You can’t even see the frame if you go full screen.
Unintuitive toolbars, takes an unnecessary amount of clicks to simply highlight a sentence, and resizing the window or moving it to a different screen reflows the content unintuitively.
Like everything else in Calibre, it has all the features I want to have and then some, but actually using them is always just a little bit more complicated than it needs to be.
So just to play devil's advocate: is it really that much more work to build something entirely new in Tauri than to just do the porting work for releasing a GTK app on Windows/macOS?
I know it's annoying but it's not like it's impossible, right?
mupdf is the mupdf of epub; it supports epub and other formats beyond pdf¹. When I've had really large files I've used mupdf to read them a few times, as it seems to be far better at handling them than other tools.
A few days ago I discovered https://github.com/ealang/pixel-reader which lets you read EPUB-s on the Miyoo Mini Plus retro gaming device with a 3.5" screen. I really enjoy reading on it.
This reminds me of programs that converted plain-text ebooks (and maybe ePubs as well?) to J2ME apps you could install on your featurephone. Good times!
I was thinking about TequilaCat the other day, in my current quest to find a good FLOSS one-size-fits-all multi format reader for Android. KOreader is clumsy, MuPDF Viewer is quite nice and minimalistic, Librera FD has lots of options but I still can't tell what bothers me.
I think it truly shows how much has changed, as a teenager I didn't care the text only format, sometimes even awfully formatted, if I could read something from my phone while commuting to school.
FBReader might be a nice choice. It's pretty minimalistic, configurable just the right amount, supports EPub, FB2, MOBI and a bunch of other formats. I'm pretty happy with it – give it a try too if you haven't yet:
How do I get it to run after downloading .tar.gz of latest release? Quickly glanced over the contents of files and it rings no bells of what this thing is or how to even build it. If it's in javascript, I should just point my web server root directory to this folder, but I don't see any index files in there.
My issue with most ebook reader is they try to be everything, catalog your entire drive etc... Foliate is the exact opposit, it opens the one file I ask it to, doesn't overtake my screen, easy to close when I'm done!
While eink displays is usually the gold standard for eBook reader, I wonder does reading it on an AMOLED screen with black background and white font is a good substitute?
does anyone know a good way to convert pdf's to epub. I tried calibre but the inconsistent formatting of pdf's make this really buggy. Is there any OCD / machine learning solution out there? :)
> I'm really curious what the current definition of "minimalistic" is.
Things like cutting off content that overruns the screen size, without giving any indication that this has happened, and also hiding scrollbars, so as to make it impossible to navigate to that content if you have neither a mousewheel nor a gesture-capable device. -- Not saying that this is what Alexandria is doing; just cracking a joke about modern designs with "minimalist" inclinations in general.
The person meant "simple" and not "minimal". I have been trying to use these two words properly as well. We use these 2 words interchangeably without realising the one doesn't mean the other.
But also, this is Tauri based, so from author's POV, definitely minimal than electronjs right? ;)
Actually, no, if everything is minimalistic, everything is. It's not a relative term, it's more of a specific quality and philosophy.
Same way if every new paiting for some reason starts being pointilistic, they don't cease to be pointilistic just because its the absolute norm.
(And even if it was a relative term, we do have experiece with non minimalistic software from the past, so we can still considered a current crop of software were everything is much more sparse and streamlined as "minimalistic" compared to that).
In any case, we're not talking about everything, just these two and any other that fits the description.
Which ebook reader does something horrible here? When not adjusting settings or loading books, most of them just display a book-like page. I haven't encountered one yet with Office-like toolbars or whatever Acrobat thinks it's doing.
"No skeuomorphic book shelf" seems like a low bar.
Many OLED screens consume less power when displaying mostly black, so it is not uncommon for phones to be used that way.
If you are used to dark mode from other uses¹ you might prefer it for everything else on *LED screens too even though it would likely feel unnatural for “real” reading on paper³.
--
[1] not caught the bug myself yet, but most of the devs around me use it for coding, I've used it for terminal work for as long as I can remember, and have my phone in dark mode² so apps & web stuff that respect that are light-on-dark
[2] apparently this saves battery life on OLED screens, though not as much as some saying that seem to think, and it is also nicer for low-light situations like when I'm shutting down in the evening (but have messages to respond to before I do).
Because LCD screens have a minimum brightness, and white-on-black lets you slightly lower that threshold if you're e.g. reading in bed on your phone at night with the lights off, and want to take the brightness as low as possible.
I used to dislike white-on-black too, but it eventually grew on me. Not least because the floaters are getting more distracting with age it seems, and black screen makes them disappear.
Because astigmatism or other refractive vision errors.
Think about how astigmatism affects vision, then take into account the effect on pupil size based on incoming brightness, and how this affects the depth of field, and you may understand why.
Some people have conditions that make dark mode text harder to read, not easier. Astigmatism is one of them. Also, myopia.
It can cause "halation" which is like a foggy glow around objects which are brighter than their relative surroundings. Like a streetlight at night, or white text on a black background.
I have this to some degree but I still prefer dark mode most of the time.
Thank you for the explanation. I thought it’s the other way: the dark mode somehow provokes your eyesight to become worse. For me, I used white-on-black since the dawn of time (with CTR displays) and even then it was much easier on my eyes. Right now, I have an iPhone’s frontal sensors dirty (have a broken screen) and it manages auto-brightness wrongly to some degree. I have a dark theme all the time, and I tried to make it automatic (light during the daytime and dark during the nighttime, obviously). So so so horrible to me! Switched it back almost immediately.
>Surely nobody is reading entire books on a laptop screen?
You'd think so, but e-readers (hardware) cost more than $0. Plus, phones are more commonly pocket-carried than ereaders (hardware) given that most ereaders (hardware) don't fit in your pocket, and most people don't buy multiple ereaders (hardware).
Same issue for me, I have a 2 paperwhites. But still primarily read from my iPad, as I also like to read online articles. Which doesn't work with the experimental browser.
The Kobo I have actually comes with an official Pocket integration out of the box! I can save articles to Pocket and read them on my e-reader.
And considering that Pocket supports highlighting things in articles, and Kobo supports highlighting things in books, I should be able to highlight articles as well, right? Nope!
Love the e-ink screen, hate the software that powers it.
Yeah, I resisted getting an ereader for the longest time because of the software and how silly DRM is. But with KOReader on my Kobo I'm pretty happy with it as a way to read paperbacks. In theory reading online articles should be as easy as an automatic converter from a browser "reader mode" to an epub. I don't know if anything exists to do that, though. Unfortunately they're just not mainstream enough to get much attention from programmers, which is a shame.
I spent a year reading on my 10.5in amoled tablet, it worked really well for night time reading at low brightness with the night filter on and KOReader in dark mode. In some ways that setup actually worked better for me than KOReader on an eink device because dark mode amoled contrast is much better than the front light on my actual eink reader.
That said, I wouldn't want to read anything except PDFs on a laptop and I'd much rather read them on a large high-refresh-rate amoled tablet.
You're getting pounded by other comments, but you're absolutely right -- it's the elephant in the room in this discussion.
The sibling comments here are pretty much variations on "I don't like/have E-ink devices, so your opinion is irrelevant", ignoring the fact that there's millions out there, and it's genuinely a popular medium.
It's pretty obvious why they're not supporting E-ink devices: that would require embedded Linux skills, and pretty low-level knowledge of the display hardware in these things. But the project was written by Typescript programmers.
Absolutely I do. It's an excellent experience to me. I've never enjoyed e-ink.
First up, excellent ergonomics. The screen is on a natural stand. I hate holding up a tablet/e-reader and always trying to rest it on something. I can change page with space-bar/cursors/touch-screen/touchpad which helps avoid my hand cramping unlike a device that supports a single grip with your thumb hovering/doing the same action repeatedly for hours.
Split-screen notes and ebook on either side with any OS chrome like top-bars, task-bars on auto-hide is beautifully minimal. With a proper keyboard, it's a wonderfully productive setup for technical reading. Navigating e-books efficiently, copy-paste sections, cross referencing multiple books and related web-searches are all vastly easier on a proper computer.
I don't experience any eye-strain with a screen set at minimal brightness with some off white/black e-reader colours.
Technical references, definitely, though they are often available as HTML rather than needing a reader for ebook formats.
I have an old Windows tablet that I use for reading occasionally – it is bigger than my phone (lower pixel density considerably, but fine enough), can be carried around more easily than a laptop, and at this point in its life is expendable – that counts as desktop with regard to running apps. Windows 8.1 though so now EOL, I'll have to see how well Linux likes its hardware as I don't fancy Win10+ on that spec!
Also: you don't need to be reading entire books for the app to be useful, especially as it runs on other devices, so you have the same reader elsewhere.
For technical references it's a very sad day if the only thing I can find is a PDF or ePub. It hasn't happened yet. Technical references aren't read sequentially; random access is essential. By far the best technology available for random access is a book. Web browsers are a close second, but only if the content has been formatted specifically for the web.
I do so regularly on my desktop PC. There's something about reading on a 27" monitor that a tiny e-ink device can't replicate. Plus it's something I already have.
Plus, the ability to reference a book while doing something else is indispensable.
That's your mistake right there. If some workflow or usage pattern is possible, you can bet that somebody, somewhere is doing it, and relying on it. No matter how silly it might look to you.
> Surely nobody is reading entire books on a laptop screen?
At least one person is doing any incredible thing that other people can think of.
Actually I don't care much about eink devices because I don't have one. I don't read ebooks on a computer screen. I read them on my phone. From my point of view an ebook reader is pointless if it doesn't run on Android.
If it syncs the current page to some server that I can self host, great, but that's a combination that I didn't find yet.
