Hello fellow self-hosters. I’m currently self-hosting the servarr stack, including jellyseer, radarr/sonarr, prowlarr transmission, and jellyfin. It works great.
I now want to expand my system into ebooks as well. I have readarr already set up, but it is too complicated for my wife. I’ve also tried calibre, which is great for ebook management,and Kavita, which is a lovely ebook server and reader. But I’m looking for something like “jellyseer for ebooks” that shows what’s currently popular and makes it easy for the user to make requests and have those requests sent to an automated backend for downloading. Additionally, it should work well from a phone, and it would be ideal if it could download from Library Genesis.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
You can use lists in Readarr. Set up a Goodreads account, link Readarr to a list in Goodreads. Any books in the list will automatically be added to Readarr.
That sounds like an interesting possibility. I’ll check it out. Thanks!
I tried the readarr and other options. They work sometimes but not enough to rely on it. As others mention, there’s no standard naming and also, lots of people use their library card for Libby access. I also think there’s a bit more of a direct link to authors so I’d prefer to buy the book unless theyre super well off anyway. To be honest, I can’t see the arr’s working with LibGen having looked at the open issues on integrating it, it just doesn’t allow for scraping in the same way.
For me, I self host openbooks (uses IRC) and select a download straight away, which to be fair, is about the same time as searching / finding a TV show if you are after one book. I have exposed it behind an SSO so can access it on my phone and download the book straight away when someone gives me a recommendation. Most of the time I just add to a running note on phone and go through it every few months when I need more books.
It’s fairly quick for multiple books but not sonarr levels of ease. The downloads go into a calibre monitored folder which then does the automation (naming, conversion if needed etc). I bulk email the new books to my kindle with one click. Calibre-web is on read only for a nice browsing experience and to read on other devices if I need to (althogh no page sync). It’s a bit of manual work but I find it is not too bad and in 10 minutes I can load up enough books for months.
Occasionally IRC does not have the book so try manually searching on prowlarr, and download on sab or transmission. The downloads are almost instant so I then just wait and copy them to my downloads folder (I could probably automate this step too with tags but it’s so infrequent).
I prefer LazyLibrarian over Readarr but it still leaves a lot to be desired for end-user usability. One of the big issues with ebooks is that data is a mess, with each book having a billion different editions with spotty metadata support that makes it hard to tell what is what.
Goodreads seems like it was a decent source of data for these types of projects but they shut off new API access a couple years ago and legacy access can go away at any moment. Hardcover seems like a promising API alternative but not sure if anyone has started integrating with them yet. Manga and comics seem to be in a better state, with a more rabid fanbase maintaining data but still nowhere near what’s available for movies and tv.
I didn’t realize that the metadata was in such a bad state. But that would explain why I’m having difficulty finding the ebook equivalent of the smooth Jellyseer/Sonarr/Jellyfin ecosystem. Thanks for the insight.