Look into Grimmory, the replacement for booklore. Apparently it’s the same maintainers just a fork since the creator of booklore closed it down (no major changes yet, just housekeeping). I’m happy with it.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
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I have found Kavita to be excellent.
Plus one for Kavita. Only slight bump is that it wants books to be in series because it's quite manga focused.
Calibre Web Automated is a completely different project. I am liking it so far.
Some people have also suggested Kavita.
Personally, I found Kavita and Grimmory far too complex for my use and also very resources hungry. At the end CWA is just perfect for me. Still have to configure my kobo e-reader to use it directly and this will for sure be a game changer from my current solution which consist in converting epub to kepub with kepubify and then put it on a local webserver that I open through kobo web browser.
Update: Kobo sync configured and it's just awesome, just adding book to a shelf and sync the reader as usual and hop, everything downloads and progress updated in cwa.
Is there something specific you don't like about Calibre Web? Might help pinpoint the recommendations.
Janky and doesn’t look nice
Well, I'm not sure what 'janky' encompasses for you but when you add themepark, it looks much better.
The real MVP!
.....aww shucks
I've tried the a number of the ones being mentioned, but the best for me has been Audio bookshelf . It has a good mobile app, allows collections, tries to pull Metadata, offline reading for the apps, etc.
Does it support epub?
Basic ebook support and ereader (epub, pdf, cbr, cbz) + send to device (i.e. Kindle)
Biggest issue is the folder/book structure is very opinionated and isn't the easiest to work with.
+1 for audiobookshelf. my buddies and I have been using it without issue for a year or so now
Did you try Calibre Web or Calibre Web Automated
Maybe CWA is what you're looking for?
It was the UI he didn't like so it's not going to be much different.
Kavita?
I'm running Kavita. It's been good and tracks your reading progress. The catch is that there's no upload, you have to put your files on the disk and then rescan
BookLore https://github.com/mvanhorn/booklore/
Killer feature for me was ability to upload books via web.
Edit: just noticed I linked wrong git, thanks @GeekyOnion@lemmy.world
https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rvmpnv/booklore_is_gone/ wtf...
I guess I'm looking for a new service now as well
I just moved off of Booklore because of the recent drama. Went back to Calibre + Calibre Web Automated.
Did you look at grimmory
Not yet. I ran Calibre + Calibre Web for a while before I found booklore, and the key thing I wanted from my setup was for things to work. I was experimenting with Booklore as a "new direction," and spent a significant amount of time troubleshooting and fixing various broken things from crashes of the ingestion job due to long file names, failure of metadata being written, OPDS problems, etc. I've been reading some web novels (2000+ chapters) for a while, so I didn't check in with the state of Booklore until recently, and now that I'm coming to the end of my most recent long story, I was going to pick back up in my TBR.
Honestly, I like self-hosting and experimenting, but I do recognize that "bleeding edge" isn't always compatible with having a relaxing experience. In this case, I want to go back to "easy," rather than "clever," or "new."
What about grimmory