I wanted something with as little infrastructure as possible, ideally no database or additional services to maintain, while still having my library available anywhere. Object storage fit that pretty well, especially with things like R2 where the free tier is already more than enough for a personal ebook library.
That said, I don’t want Bookshelf to be tied to one particular setup forever. The plan is to keep the core idea of minimal infrastructure, while adding more storage/deployment options over time.
Looking forward to seeing what comes next for Bookshelf!
If there would be just anything actually good. But for some reason they all have just very basic organisation-levels, and barely any support for handling custom data from calibre.
For some reason, streaming ebooks seems to be also not existing. One can either download the whole book, or use some lousy in-browser-reader. So strange how the ebook-world has no decent software for selfhosting.
FWIW the tool I’ve built has no built-in ereader because I use apps like Apple Books or my kobo to read. i don’t need another half-built ereader
Custom fields for metadata and accessibility from different devices. Usually there is only hardcoded metadata, tags or categories and one or more systems for collections. And moving data between different software is also quite limited of course.
At the moment I manage everything with calibre on desktop, and use calibre-sync(?) on mobile which has full support for calibres metadata, including the custom fields. But it has no builtin reader and a very unoptimized interface. So the whole handling is very cumbersome, I have to first filter for what I seek, then download it, then change to the reader-app, and maybe organize the file there too, and afterwards I have to delete the local file and manage stuff on desktop like read-state, rating, etc.
Most applications just use epub.js which needs the whole book loaded at once.
Edit: Also Kavita does support some calibre tags for metadata and def is much more customizable with a powerful filtering system which you can then bind to your dashboard/side nav.
www.kavitareader.com for those that might be interested (or check the wiki to get a bit more about it).
Like this self-hosted project aims for "simple deployment"/less infra, but I can't imagine how you end up at "use Cloudflare proprietary offerings" and reconcile that with "self hosted".
But if you host the node app yourself and point it at your own seaweedfs/minio/garage that's still more infra than node process+SQLite file.
Bookshelf, for example -- what possesses someone to make an ebook library that _only works on object storage_? Is this a weekend project, answering the question of "what would this look like"? Or was it something the author wanted for a long time?