Nice but 1) doesn’t Kobo use DRM? 2) I had thought selfhosted was about server apps. Calibre is great but it’s a client app. Should this post be in a different group?
Also (to everyone else reading your comment) let’s not downvote good faith comments, especially when they’re phrased as a question and wanting to learn more
Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books and you’re basically off to the races.
calibre is an app? i just have a docker container with calibre web for all my epub, mobi etc.since bookstack or nextcloud cant handle those.
is the client app any good?
All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.
For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.
Nice but 1) doesn’t Kobo use DRM? 2) I had thought selfhosted was about server apps. Calibre is great but it’s a client app. Should this post be in a different group?
I’ve heard Kobo is better than the other big players when it comes to interoperability with open formats / self hosted setups.
As for the servers
The main one
https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
A popular newer one
https://github.com/crocodilestick/Calibre-Web-Automated
Also (to everyone else reading your comment) let’s not downvote good faith comments, especially when they’re phrased as a question and wanting to learn more
Kobo has a great balance of good hardware, good price, and good openness. It’s not perfect on any of those categories, it just strikes a nice middle ground balance to make it an extremely popular ereader for people who require the kind of openness people like us do. There’s really nothing locked down about them, they don’t do anything in particular to make it easy, but they don’t do anything to make it hard either. “koreader” installs very nicely on Kobo devices, and then you just load your books and you’re basically off to the races.
I didn’t downvote anything fwiw.
Kobo does not block non-drm. Calibre is used as a server all the time, see calibre-web.
Thanks. What I meant is, if I buy a job book off bn.com, can I read it with calibre? Those books usually have drm but maybe calibre can bypass it.
Calibre can also be a server. https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/server. I use it all the time with my library.
Thanks, I didn’t know about that. I might try it.
Calibre can also be a server. And you can still put DRM free books on your Kobo device.
calibre is an app? i just have a docker container with calibre web for all my epub, mobi etc.since bookstack or nextcloud cant handle those. is the client app any good?
All the choices for “ebook stores” and ereader ecosystems are proprietary vendor-locked services with no self-hosting options. While Calibre is primarily a “local” tool it is a true alternative to all these proprietary services and I think it’s at least in the spirit of self hosting, if not strictly the letter.
For what it’s worth, I self-host a Calibre Portable library on Nextcloud, which enables me to access all my ebooks anywhere, and to upload new ones to my ereader from anywhere, as long as I have access to my Nextcloud. And I also share the same library through Calibre Web for when I don’t. I retain control of all my books, I remove all the DRM and convert them to epub. Calibre isn’t a hosted service on its own, but it fits nicely into the self-hosting ecosystem, and for that I am grateful.