
Ask HN: Self-hosted Google Books alternative? - ocdtrekkie
Hey HN,<p>I have a lot of eBooks, and I often find the information in those eBooks superior to what you can just find on open webpages. And with the Humble Books Bundle often doing tech ebooks, I&#x27;ve really boosted the size of my collection lately.<p>Of course, the challenge is finding the information I need when I need it. I feel like I need something very similar to Google Books, where I can full-text search my eBook collection, but it needs to be able to run on my own PC, and use my own library of materials. PDF support is a must, DRM support is not.
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walterbell
You can organize the books in Calibre, e.g. with tags and other metadata. Then
use a Linux desktop search engine like Recoll or Beagle to index both the
content and metadata, [https://www.linux.com/news/linux-desktop-search-
engines-comp...](https://www.linux.com/news/linux-desktop-search-engines-
compared)

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ocdtrekkie
There's some great options in this link, thanks! It's probably worth noting
that I'm on Windows for my desktop, so I guess I either need a Windows-
compatible desktop option, or a Linux-compatible web option.

DocFetcher is fully multi-platform, which might be a nice option to look at.
Though then I have to install Java. :/

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4684499
In the past, you could use Google Desktop to index your documents (like docs,
pdfs, not sure about other ebooks format) and get full-text search, but it has
been killed by Google for years[1]. However there are some alternatives[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop)

[2] [http://alternativeto.net/software/google-
desktop/](http://alternativeto.net/software/google-desktop/)

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hop_a
If you are comfortable with a little bit of coding; I think both Apache Solr
and Elastic Search will allow you to index and search pdfs.

