I would like to start managing ebooks and manga properly. I don’t have many, but I plan on increasing my collection. My requirements are not so strict, I don’t mind getting the books/manga myself, but I am also curious about setting up LazyLibrarian at one point, is it worth it? (I already have other *arrs installed on my server). I had similar thoughts about Suwayomi.

My confusion starts from the accessories around all this: Calibre, CalibreWeb/Automated, Komga, Kavita, Audiobookshelf, etc. Does having a Kindle as reading device limits my possibilities to use any of these? Is setting up e.g. both CalibreWeb and Kavita redundant?

I guess my question is how is everyone using these services for their own library :)

  • tal
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    1 day ago

    I would like to start managing ebooks and manga properly.

    I guess my question is how is everyone using these services for their own library :)

    I moved away from dedicated readers. They’re nice, but I have a tablet, a phone, and a laptop. I don’t need a fourth device with me.

    For me, the major selling point for dedicated readers is that they buy eInk: their insane battery life and how they work very well in sunlight or otherwise brightly-lit conditions, so you can read outside.

    For comics — I don’t know if you’re only viewing black-and-white manga — my understanding is that color eInk displays have limited contrast compared to the black-and-white ones. I think that if I were viewing anything in color, I’d probably want to use some kind of LED or LCD display.

    I will occasionally read content on my Android phone with fbreader. The phone isn’t really a great platform for reading books — just kind of small — but it does a good job of filling the “I’m waiting in a line and need to kill a few minutes”. With an e-reader, you need something like Calibre to transfer books on and off, but with Android, I can just transfer files the way I normally would, via sftp or similar. I don’t have any kind of synchronized system for managing those books spanning multiple devices.

    I use an Android tablet sometimes, almost always when I want to cuddle up on a couch or just want a larger display or want to watch videos. Same kind of management/use case. I think I used fbreader to last read an epub thing. I’ve switched among various comics and manga-viewing software, am not particularly tied to any one. There’s a family of manga-viewing software that downloads manga from websites that host it; I can’t recall the most-recent one I’ve used, but in my limited experience, they all work vaguely the same way.

    I’ve increasingly been just using GNU/Linux systems for more stuff, as long as space permits; I’d rather limit my Android exposure, as I’d rather be outside the Google ecosystem, and the non-Google non-Apple mobile and tablet world isn’t all that extensive or mature. For laptops, higher power consumption, but also vastly larger battery, and much more capable. On desktop, it’s nice to have a really large screen to read with. For comics — and I haven’t been reading graphic novels or comics in some time, so I’m kind of out of date — I use mcomix. For reading epubs, I use foliate in dark mode. I have, in the past, written some scripts to convert long text files into LaTeX and from thence into pretty-formatted PDFs; I’ll occasionally use those when reading long text files, as I have a bunch of prettification logic that I’ve built into those over the years.

    I don’t have any kind of system to synchronize material across devices or track reading in various things. Just hasn’t really come up. If I’m reading something on two different devices, I’ll just be reading two different books at the same time. Probably have some paper books and magazines that I’m working on at the same time too.

    • whysofurious@sopuli.xyzOP
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      23 hours ago

      Thanks so much for sharing and for such a detailed answer! I understand where you are coming from, I don’t have a tablet so for me an e-ink reader would not be too much (I work on my laptop most of the day and I don’t like reading on the phone, so a device like that is a sweet spot for me).

      I tend to mostly read bw manga (webtoons I read it on my laptop usually), but I heard the same about e-ink colored devices (and most generally that you “shouldn’t” read bw on colored eink screen).

      For the same reason as yours (mandatory calibre for transferring), I am looking at Onyx Boox e-ink devices, which are basically android tablets but with an eink screen. This gives me the freedom to install whatever app or sync I want, limit my exposure with something like nextdns, remove google stuff as much as I can, and things like that.

      In the end I guess it’s a balance between actual functionality and convenience, if a whole pipeline become too hard to manage than doing some parts manually might actually be better.