
The Calibre Content Server - dabber
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server.html
======
criddell
I've always just used Calibre because it's a nice way for me to strip DRM and
then archive my books. I've never really used it any kind of active way. Since
I buy pretty much everything from Amazon, I already effectively have a content
server.

Does anybody have a link to an online server (with public domain books)? I'm
curious to see what the presentation is like. What's the typography like? Does
the screen dim after 30s? What's the browser battery consumption like compared
to an ereader app?

Long term, my big concern about ebooks is DRM. Amazon's most recent version
(KFX) hasn't been cracked and workarounds involve getting Amazon to send you
an older version of the file with older, crappier hyphenation and layout. I've
started mostly buying DRM free books from Amazon, but they don't make it easy
to find them.

~~~
sohkamyung
My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

Most of my purchases are from Weightless Books [1] which sells only DRM free
books and magazines.

Granted, this is a limited and small market (SF related stuff) but if I have a
choice of getting a book DRM free from a vendor or getting it from Amazon, I
would avoid Amazon, even if its price was cheaper.

[1] [https://weightlessbooks.com/](https://weightlessbooks.com/)

~~~
iak8god
> My response is to avoid buying ebooks from Amazon if possible.

This severely limits what ebooks one can read. I used to torrent DRM-free
epubs and buy the paper copy so I could support the work without appearing to
support DRM. Lately though I've been skipping the torrent part and just buying
the paper books.

~~~
roryisok
I wonder how many people do this and if it over inflates piracy figures or
physical book readership

~~~
oridecon
Does it even matter when the people using these numbers will distort the facts
anyway?

(this may not apply that much to books but most types of content are usually
filled with DRM garbage, region restrictions, usually have worse quality and
distribution methods, and they pretend to not understand why people choose to
pirate it)

~~~
JeremyBanks
If you think most people who pirate are aware of region restrictions or notice
the quality difference, I think you're mistaken. That's a rationale that some
idealists use, but most people would just rather not pay.

Streaming video piracy sites are becoming more popular than downloading, and
that's usually poorer quality and worse interfaces than the official sources.

~~~
oridecon
> but most people would just rather not pay

These people wouldn't pay no matter what you do so it's not really relevant.
I'm talking about people who resort to piracy because they can't pay to get
what they want. Or the value just isn't justifiable.

For example, I feel cheated when I have to wait months for content to be
available in my country. Sometimes years (or not ever). So I go and download
some torrent since I can't buy the content anyway. And now I'm one of the
numbers on their spreadsheets.

If licensing is broken or too hard to manage, they should spent the money
fixing that instead of going after "pirates".

------
peternicky
Related but slightly off topic:

Am I the only one who is turned off to calibre due to how "heavy" and clunky
it feels? I suspect this is due to the program being written in Java. I think
the author does great work maintaining the project but frankly wish it was
more modern.

Perhaps this is a good side project for me to delve into ;)

EDIT: thanks to users who clarified that Calibre is written in python.

~~~
tomc1985
Much as I love pyGTK, apps written in it feel pretty chunky :/

Here's looking at you, Mint Menu

(not nearly as bad as Electron though)

~~~
peternicky
I disagree, while Electron apps have trade offs, I never experience the
experience of clunkiness I find with Calibre.

~~~
yunyu
Try resizing a window in any Electron app. Bonus points if you have display
scaling enabled.

~~~
ReverseCold
Works fine. That's not the issue with electron (for me at least), it's battery
life/power consumption.

~~~
yunyu
On every machine I've used any Electron app on, there are large gray areas
that flash and lag behind the mouse cursor when resizing (it's especially
noticeable on Slack). On hidpi displays, half the time there are 1px black
lines remaining on the right and bottom sides (probably due to poor rounding).
Compare that to native apps like Sublime or Windows Explorer.

~~~
ReverseCold
Just tested on both a 4k 13" Windows Display and a 2K 15" Mac Display - yes I
see what you mean. That is pretty bad, though I've never noticed that before.

------
rufugee
I've been searching for a solution to handle the various ebooks I buy and to
allow me to annotate them in a centrally stored location. I have kindle
purchases, pdfs, epubs, and mobis from various publishers.

Moon Reader ([http://www.moondownload.com](http://www.moondownload.com)) would
be great if it had a desktop or web-based client...however, it's only
supported on Android. If Calibre can give me this experience, it's value just
increased immensely. Looking forward to trying this.

~~~
throwanem
"Note:

"On initial release, the book reader is fully functional but is missing some
more advanced features from the main calibre viewer, such as popup footnotes,
bookmarks and annotations in general. These will be added in due course. In
fact, the browser reader is designed to eventually replace the main viewer,
once it matures."

~~~
michaelmrose
On mobile I would rather use something that doesn't stop working when I don't
have internet access. I kind of expect any browser based reader to be
thoroughly mediocre compared to actual clients.

~~~
throwanem
"The server downloads and stores the book you are reading in an off-line cache
so that you can read it even when there is no internet connection."

------
blfr
I love it in principle but, considering how small most books are relatively to
storage space offered by modern devices, even mobile ones, what is the upside
of storing content centrally instead of just carrying a copy with you?

~~~
Santosh83
Many of my ebooks are anywhere from 50 to 350 Mb. That adds up when you want
to load many of them. The downside of course is that you need a good Net
connection, unless the Calibre Content Server can be configured to do some
kind of 'trimming', while serving the ebooks over the wire.

Also a content server mitigates you having to manage and synchronise your
ebooks in multiple places. You only need to manage one library. Although I
guess any sync application can work just as well for this.

~~~
walterbell
Why are your ebooks so large?

~~~
Santosh83
They contain a lot of colour images and diagrams. Books on biology and art.
Granted other topics including fiction are usually in the ballpark of a few
megabytes.

~~~
breakingcups
Kilobytes even

------
fest
I thought that this was a recently added feature. Turns out it has been there
since at least 2011 (based on a forum thread about it). Will have to try it!

~~~
jpindar
The content server has been around for a while, but the ability to read the
books in the browser is new.

~~~
garettmd
Newish, it's been around for at least a few months now, since I first tried it
out a few months ago. I got excited seeing the link on HN, thinking it was
some new feature added to the server

------
dubyte
I did a little go server to expose an opds basend of a dir structure

[https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds](https://github.com/dubyte/dir2opds)

So far I only tested on moonreader

------
dancsi
It would be great if this feature was extended so that I can sync my books
across different Calibre installations on different machines.

~~~
StavrosK
Can't you just put your library and database on git or Dropbox? It should just
work, unless you're accessing them from two devices at the same time.

~~~
jpindar
I do, with Dropbox, and it mostly works... but it's very easy to get the
database corrupted even if you are careful not to have more than one instance
of Calibre open.

I haven't tried using a source control system, that might work better. Hmmm.

And of course that only works for computers, There isn't a full version of
Calibre for Android.

~~~
the_af
Out of curiosity, how does your DB on Dropbox get corrupted if not by having
more than one instance of Calibre open?

I'm asking because I use Dropbox to store my Keepass DB, and so far (2+ years)
I haven't had any problems.

~~~
jpindar
I don't know. But I occasionally find files with names like foo(username's
conflicted copy).db.

I do the Keepass thing too, and this has happened with it's files as well, but
that doesn't seem to cause any problems.

~~~
StavrosK
Those aren't corrupted databases, it just can't merge so it leaves you to pick
the version you want. Just pick one and keep using it, at most you'll lose
some recent changes from the other computer.

~~~
jpindar
I should have known not to use language imprecisely on HN. :)

To the layman, any situation that results in having Calibre show books which
are not in fact there, or having books in the library which are not shown in
Calibre, or having Calibre's check library function report that there are
"invalid titles", "missing formats" etc., could be casually described as
"corruption".

~~~
StavrosK
Sure, but the worst case is that you don't see books which are in your
filesystem, and then all you need to do to fix that is click "Add books".

------
jl6
I am a happy user of Calibre and am grateful for the work the author has done,
but I've never heard a convincing explanation of why it is so slow when adding
books and updating metadata. 10-15 seconds to add a 500KB ePub. I have apps
that will transcode 4K video at a higher throughput than that. What's it
doing?!

~~~
michaelmrose
2 seconds to add a 12MB pdf

Calibre 2.85 Funtoo Linux Current reading a file from a ssd that wasn't
previously cached or opened prior to test. Same speed with a 300k file
therefore obviously time is dominated by whatever calibre does when it adds a
book not reading the file.

------
projectorlochsa
Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with
speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix
it.

~~~
michaelmrose
Is this a function of the number of existing books in the library? Basically
does this appear only with large libraries? Might be worth filing a bug I have
found the author to be pretty quick in responding.

~~~
projectorlochsa
Nope. Works slow with 0 books, although I do have about 700, which still is by
Big-Oh standards, at least it should be, small.

~~~
michaelmrose
2422 books here all of the above ought to be small though as noted. I think it
would be interesting to profile and figure out which part is slow. Is it
equally slow if you run calibredb add in the terminal?

------
fest
It looks like you still need Calibre GUI to add books- this is read-only
interface.

I was hoping that this could replace my Google Drive folder with various
papers on interesting topics I'd like to read.

------
r3bl
They have also made Calibre look a little less crappy on high definition
screens, and added a conversion to .docx: [https://calibre-ebook.com/new-
in/twelve](https://calibre-ebook.com/new-in/twelve)

~~~
mrmondo
So glad about this, it always looked terrible on any Macs as it wasn't really
designed with 2.5K-5K screens in mind.

------
drumttocs8
I've been using Google Play Books as a way to keep my books in the cloud,
ready and available. Looking forward to seeing how Calibre works in
comparison- hopefully much greater control, with similar functionality.

------
CaptSpify
Having tried to set this up, it's a neat idea, but needs a lot more work
before it's ready. Can't logout users, poor interface design, a bunch of JS
errors when just trying to load a book (immediate request timeouts, incorrect
paths, trying to access missing objects, non-working buttons, etc).

I hope it gets better though, because it's a great concept

 _EDIT: also, the forums aren 't letting me register due to an error in their
captcha being broken, so I can't discuss/submit my bugs there.

_EDIT2: I was able submit a bug report to lanuchpad.

------
robk
I love Calibre and contribute recipe updates often but don't really see the
value of the server. I script things to download via command line and then
send to kindle over email. It's more robust than the front end and less hassle
than running a server you have to use the browser to access. Given file sizes
are small (this week's Economist is about 15mb) it's perfectly Fine to us
email.

~~~
roryisok
One guy further up the thread has 350mb ebooks

~~~
ktta
There are people who have 200GB of books (non-fiction only so none of the
fiction books that seem to come out at an alarming rate every day)

~~~
lfowles
Books that are 350MB individually*

Many comic books from recent humble bundles have been around that size, for
example.

~~~
ktta
I am having a bad day understanding comments.

------
mahyarm
I personally just use iBooks as my personal content server / ebook reader. Get
your epubs somehow and drag & drop to iBooks. It syncs with all of your
devices whiles using your iCloud account. It's very easy, and I've found
iBooks the nicest ebook reader yet.

I like it better than amazon's kindle apps and you can use an open format.

------
truffle_pig
Semi-related: I wrote a fb messenger bot [1] which can send any ebooks
(including epub) to your kindle.

It's handy if you've only got access to an epub, and a bit less clunky than
sending via email.

[1] [https://m.me/kindleebooksender](https://m.me/kindleebooksender)

~~~
yunyu
Just so you're aware, I added it and Messenger automatically sent the "Get
Started" text, and the typing animation ran for about 30 seconds until it
stopped with nothing happening.

~~~
truffle_pig
Huh that's weird. I'm looking at the logs, and this is the first time that's
ever happened. It will usually just spit out the following introductory text:

    
    
      Hi there! Send me your ebooks and I'll send them to your Kindle.
      To get started, I'll need you to first tell me your Kindle's email address.
      This can be found on your Kindle management page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/manage?ie=UTF8#pdocSettings
    
      (ending with @kindle.com)
    

Will look into this, thanks!

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flappydev
can someone tell (test) for me if calibre server serves to a console browser
such as elinks ?

Thanks

