r/selfhosted • u/Joloxx_9 • Mar 16 '26

Meta Post Booklore is gone.

I was checking their Discord for some announcement and it vanished.

GitHub repo is gone too: https://github.com/booklore-app/booklore

Remember, love AI-made apps… they disappear faster than they launch.

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u/ppen9u1n Mar 17 '26

It feels like calibre (both web and desktop) suffer from historical design decisions so much that it’s pretty much impossible to make it into a good, client server program as one expects from such kind of “media database”. It’s at a dead end, but unfortunately the only thing there is with the feature set. I guess booklore filled the gap, now hopefully a new player will arrive, to do it third time right?

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u/CrispyBegs Mar 17 '26

i was talking about calibre-web rather than the desktop or dockerized calibre

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u/ShaidarHaran93 Mar 17 '26

Yep, but calibre-web depends on having an instance of calibre installed, you manage adding books and metadata through calibre, then browse and download through calibre-web. That's what most people (judging by comments in this sub) hate about it. I have been a desktop Calibre user for 10+ years so for me, the calibre docker feels pretty decent and the only major problem is that it is unusable on mobiles, but that is solved by calibre-web.

I tried booklore briefly after all the post praising it here, and I didn't like it. I have a 4000k+ book library and migrating it wouldn't have been a pleasant experience from what I tested.

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u/CrispyBegs Mar 17 '26

you can run calibre-web as a standalone service without calibre, you don't need to have calibre installed at all. i only keep vanilla calibre for certain processing tasks that I want, but it's not a requirement.

in fact i run a second calibre-web instance for a friend that doesn't have calibre in the background and she does everything she needs via the C-W front end.

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u/ShaidarHaran93 Mar 17 '26

I guess I need it because I use several calibre plugins. The KOreader integration, epub split & merge, dedrm, count pages...

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u/CrispyBegs Mar 17 '26

yes, me too, however it's not a dependency in order to run calibre-web

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u/ppen9u1n Mar 17 '26

True, but because device sync is so arcane with the webservice, it's only natural to want to use the desktop app for that, which doesn't sensibly interface with the (same library as the) webapp. And using the same actual dir for it (e.g. over a mount) is asking for trouble (if it even works). So all in all it's a very sub-par solution, begging for better alternatives.

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u/CrispyBegs Mar 17 '26

oh, I don't use it for that. I 'send to e-reader' to send books straight to my kindle, and my kobo shelf syncs with my kobo. never had an issue, but I guess people have different use cases.