eBook management for Kobo
I have an older kobo (Kobo Libra H20) and have been using Calibre, and basically manually plugging it in and syncing books over to it.
I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good ways of doing wireless sync?
I've looked into KoReader but not sure exactly how involved that would be to set up. I am comfortable setting up something "SelfHosted" as long as I can easily spin it up and spin it down, I don't currently have any computer I leave on 100% of the time.
I've seen previous topics here, and Booklore looked interesting, but when I went to track it down it looks like the website is down (the GitHub is still there though), and apparently lots of controversy surrounding it in some reddit posts...it looks like there is maybe a fork of it (Grimmory), but I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with it or anything similar.
I'd prefer something without a lot of AI/LLM use, but not sure how realistic that is.
I only read eBooks, not manga/visual novels, and I don't listen to audiobooks so I don't necessarily need anything with support for any of those.
I would also be fine paying for something, but preferably only a one-time fee not a subscription.
I primarily read books on my Kobo, but it would be a "nice to have" if I could somehow sync to my iPhone (or Apple books) and iPad, but not required (and I don't need it to sync progress between devices, as I'd pretty much only be reading on one at a time).
Additional "nice to have" would be the ability to add books from any device.
Any suggestions? Just use Calibre content server? Or is there something "better"?
Koreader does take a bit of setup but it’s well worth it in my opinion. And after years of using it I discovered the BookShelf plugin which gives you a Home Screen very similar to the stock kobo screen (nickel).
For wireless book syncing you can have calibre running a server and use PDS (I think?) to browse from your koreader and download the books this way. Very similar to how the kobo store works except with your own books.
Ended up basically doing this, decided I don’t need a host running all the time, and just running the Calibre content server and connecting using KOReader’s OPDS browser is really what I was looking for, rather than doing the direct “connect to device.”
Will have to check out BookShelf, that sounds neat.
I’ve got this site bookmarked for wireless Kobo transfers. I haven’t used it though, so no guarantees. Also this is more of a one-off tool than full wireless sync.
I’m pretty sure it wasn’t vibecoded, because I’ve had it in my bookmarks for quite a while.
I personally use BookFusion for my whole library which gives me cross-device syncing (it’s not self-hostable though).
They don’t have KOReader support yet, so you wouldn’t be able to use it on your Kobo currently, but it’s in the works.Nevermind, it’s live. I’ll try this out once I get home from my trip.Based on Koreader's wiki it looks like all Kobo devices are supported so installing it shouldn't be too bad. There are quite a few guides available and the installation scripts they release make it pretty quick.
As @preposterous mentioned, Calibre has wireless syncing options with OPDS. As for self-hosting Calibre Web, I would recommend checking out a couple different forks that bake in some convenience features. Calibre-Web-Automated and autocaliweb are both well maintained and popular. I'm running autocaliweb because it adds better support for metadata providers that I've found useful.
KOReader really wasn’t that hard to install, you’re right (I found a “one click” install script that maybe it extremely simple).
I think the OPDS functionality is what I was missing the last time I tried, it’s much nicer IMO than doing the direct device connection.
Yeah it's a problem and I don't have what I think is the best solution but I have a solution.
I installed Koreader and Syncthing. Not the most convenient but I'm putting it out there in case it's useful. So that I just need to put the files in a folder of another computer.
This is a really cool solution. Thank you for sharing.
Do you leave syncthing running or just toggle it as needed?
FWIW Syncthing is pretty resilient to being killed and started so even if you wanted an out of band script that only ran Syncthing for a few hours every night via timeout it should be perfectly fine.
Either should work fine so do what works for you. Let it fully sync the first time then only turn it on when you want to sync deletions or add new content
I love using Koreader to get my devices exactly the way I like them. Koreader reminds me a lot of Retroarch with its arcane menus and endless options. Currently I upload from my phone/desktop to Calibre-Web and then use Koreader as an OPDS client to move books to my devices.
Here are a couple other options:
BookOrbit https://github.com/bookorbit/bookorbit
Calibre-Web https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web
Calibre-Web-Automated https://github.com/crocodilestick/Calibre-Web-Automated
Grimmory https://github.com/grimmory-tools/grimmory
Kavita https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita
Komga https://github.com/gotson/komga
Stump https://github.com/stumpapp/stump
BookOrbit and Kavita appear to be the best choices for large libraries based on a this reddit post. Grimmory is a fork of BookLore and seems to be a resource hog. The performance probably won't matter for a tiny library.
Haven't tried this out yet personally but several of these library managers support Kobo sync. You replace the default Kobo api endpoint by modifying a config file on the device. Then your own server takes over syncing books and tracking reading progress using the original interface.
Check out booklore. It's a self hosted book server. You can redirect the api endpoint on your kobo to your self hosted booklore server, and it automatically syncs your books. Very convenient. I'd be happy to help you set it up if you get stuck.
Edit: check out grimmory instead.
I would recommend migrating off of Booklore. A few months back the developer nearly nuked the project after someone audited the codebase. The github repo seems to be back right now, but I would consider this project unstable at best. Grimmory is a fork of Booklore that might be more appealing or stick with a Calibre Web fork that provides a higher confidence of stability from the maintainers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rs275q/psa_think_hard_before_you_deploy_booklore/
This is funny to read since I settled on booklore after trying a few calibre web forks which all seemed extremely unstable. I'll check out grimmory, but I haven't had a single issue with booklore so far.
I've used Calibre in the past and found it to be very bloated and cumbersome, so for a long time have been doing similar to you (manual plug and sync).
I actually just discovered Booklore (which led me to Grimmory) this weekend and have been giving it a go, trying to organize my library of ebooks, manga, and audiobooks in it. So far it is also feels like it's trending toward very bloated and overkill for my needs (less cumbersome than Calibre, but only just barely). My audiobooks/ebooks are not very well organized and their baked-in metadata is all over the place so it's been quite a bit of work getting it all under control. I'm hopeful that once everything is organized, keeping it that way as I add new media in the future will be a lot simpler. I haven't even tried any of its Kobo sync features yet, but I'll probably be toying with that some time this week.
Quick update on this:
Grimmory's metadata editing shortcomings and slowness was driving me crazy, so I spun up a copy of BookOrbit instead and started over from scratch. Having a lot more success with this. Specifically it has a table view that lets you list your whole library with title, authors, series, series #, and other fields available as editable cells, so I can spot-check and fix my whole library all from one page without having to jump through a bunch of different views and modals just to edit one property. It also seems a lot snappier than Grimmory across the board and uses PostgreSQL instead of MariaDB behind the scenes, though it's very clearly based off the same code base.
Still haven't tried any Kobo sync stuff, but unless BookOrbit really drops the ball on that I'm probably sticking with it.
Edit: I've tried setting up Kobo sync now (native, not KOReader). Couple things I'm not sure I like.
You can't use it with your Kobo in sideload mode, because the way it works is you override the Kobo API url with a specific url pointing to your BookOrbit server, and then you create collections on BookOrbit that are configured to sync with the Kobo. Then when you add new books to those collections, they show up on your Kobo the next time it syncs. It's pretty slick, but since you can't use sideload mode it means you need to have an official Kobo account to sign into and you have to live with all the marketing popups and discovery fluff in the UI.
It only works for epub files, you can't sync other formats (pdf, mobi, cbz). This may be a deal breaker for me since over half the stuff I read on my Kobo is comics and manga which I only have in cbz, cbr, and pdf formats (and converting those to epub wouldn't really make any sense).
I use the Calibre content server with my Kobo running KOReader. I would say it's not a true "sync" in that all it does is allow you to download books from Calibre and there's no uploading of anything like reading status or notes/highlights.
I say this as someone pretty comfortable with tech but I found KOReader really simple to get running on the Kobo. https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices
I don't use it but I know there is also a Calibre plug-in made for syncing and integrating with Kobo devices that I think is good if you just want to use the Kobo without KOReader. https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=366110
I have some experience using the Kobo plugins for Calibre, and they are pretty decent if that's the workflow you're going for (Calibre for managing -> reading natively on Kobo). There was some wonkiness with how the Kobo database needs to be updated if you want to sync fields other than title and author (to get series and series # to sync it required first choosing the book and sending it to the device, then a second "sync kobo database" step to transfer over all the extra metadata), but once you figure it out that's not so bad. It would also convert epub to kepub automatically during the transfer, so you get whatever extra goodies that format gives you in the native Kobo reader.
Outside of syncing wirelessly, I have the same Kobo and KOReader in landscape with two columns is such a pleasant way to read -- you can customize the header and footer and... everything else. its really great. Also has excellent stylesheet overriding. The refreshing is cleaner and the install is one-click [2]
For transfers, I've seen https://github.com/patelneeraj/filebrowserplus.koplugin mentioned a lot,
but I haven't used it.-- this is pretty great, actually. A total breeze to setup.[1] https://i.ibb.co/S7r9S1my/koreader.jpg
[2] https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314220
I tried setting up calibre, but my reading habits are quite chaotic that I couldn’t get into a sensible workflow managing my library on a computer.
Currently this is my workflow.
Reading a book in the Readest app, or using Koreader on my Kobo, progress can be synced automatically or manually. Books already on the Kobo can also be synced to Readest cloud.
Some small problems:
Using koreader I encountered slow WiFi scanning and not able to use koreader until the process finished, maybe there are some settings I could tweak.
Readest cloud has 500 mb in the free tier. Should be enough for currently reading, but maybe too small for full library management. More storage is possible or using your own storage provider, but requires a Readest premium subscription (they offer lifetime).