I’m looking to expand into having a online library and looking for some real world experiences and opinions. Ideally, looking for someone that worked well with docker and the various arrs.
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- 9 days
I’ve got BookOrbit and Audiobookshelf both going. They both can be hosted securely (locked down compose file with read-only, non-root user, etc.) and use Postgres as their DBs, both key features.
I added in BookOrbit to try since it has kobo sync and koreader sync that Audiobookshelf lacks.
I moved books from Audiobookshelf to get BookOrbit going and there was a learning curve to get the UI to do it optimally for me, but I eventually got it to work for me. BookOrbit has the ability to write metadata to the files themselves, which most things lack. Very nice for portability.
There’s a folder BookOrbit imports from and you can set it to populate metadata automatically - seems strongly built for an automated library system.
Both have been very stable. I’d say BookOrbit is the better one - and it supports audiobooks too. Audiobookshelf handles multiple libraries (like books and comics) in a clunky way (have to switch between them like they’re completely different silo’d libraries - much like how Calibre handles them). BookOrbit has them separated but easy to see they exist and you can mix and match them in a collection or something. Better way to handle it.
I use the desktop application Calibre to convert books as needed, but BookOrbit will automatically generate kobo epubs from epubs when syncing so I need not worry about kepub prep.
Lastly, I chose BookOrbit to try over others because Grimmory needs a ton of RAM, Kavita had features behind a paywall, some other one is comic-focused, and the Calibre web iterations give off the vibe of a lot of tapes the inside to make them work; I had big doubts Calibre Web Auto would be able to be run non-root and read-only. Chose Audiobookshelf originally because of the Calibre mess and other options didn’t exist or were much less established.
Edit: lore drop: BookOrbit is a feature copy of Booklore but written not in Java (I think JS), and Grimmory is a community fork of Booklore after its creator fell into AI psychosis.
Edit double: I have found out through insanely unethical and horrendous subterfuge that the creator of BookOrbit is the creator of Booklore. I expected a semi-slop-copy of Booklore by someone who was annoyed at how sloppy Booklore was, especially since they were developed in parallel for a while. Nope, the Booklore creator just pretended to be someone else like a psycho to launder rep. I’m not fucking with it for now, but I’m looking again at an alternate since the creator is unhinged.
