Taking Ebooks to the Next Level with Booklore

In my home office, I have a shelf with a few books. Mostly technical books with a small shelf at the top of fiction, humor, and biographical books, but what I have a far larger collection of is ebooks. Until recently, they didn’t really live anywhere except for a folder on my hard drive, a Dropbox folder, or they were left un-downloaded in a service here and there. Storing them like that makes them virtually useless.

Booklore and few hours of setup and organizing things solved that problem for me.

Calibre

I actually thought I solved this problem a couple of years ago when I ran into Calibre. The intent is there with Calibre, but as you can see from one click to their website, the execution is not. Lots of features, but a terrible interface for their app and a missing web interface that is propped up by some other users creating a related project. I love their work, but Calibre just wasn’t working for me. It is just too fussy.

Booklore

Calibre was such a tease in that it was almost the solution I was looking for that I briefly thought about making my own book database application, but luckily I dug my feet just long enough to find Booklore.

Booklore is exactly what I was looking for:

• Web Interface – Apps are great, but I want to be able to access my books anywhere.
• Kobo Device Syncing – Calibre web has this too, and reading on the Kobo is way better than any web reading interface.
• Easy Metadata Fetching – Ebooks usually don’t have much metadata, so your database is a mess without this.
• Multiple Users

It’s a young open source project, so you do need a little know-how or have access to someone else’s know-how to get it going. I was able to set up a new Booklore instance via Docker on a server I have pretty quickly, and it’s been great. The only issue I had was that an update broke Kobo syncing, but I filed a ticket on their GitHub, and the issue was patched within a day.

I’d love a feature that converts a PDF to an ePub file, improving metadata discovery for comic books would be a huge help, and the ability to generate a link to a book I own for quick sharing would be wonderful additions, but just being able to make my ebook collection into something that is usable is already a huge improvement.

If you’re interested in Booklore, check out their site and GitHub page and if you need help setting up an instance, feel free to reach out!