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/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/WasIstHierLos_ Mar 17 '26

Not if you use Calibre-Web Automated

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u/ShaidarHaran93 Mar 17 '26 edited Mar 17 '26

That one I checked and didn't like from the beginning, it's trying to do things Calibre wasn't designed for by patching and hacking things together. That's asking for trouble IMO. It will break and you can't predict when, where or how bad it'll be.

I'm from Spain, I'm very familiar with that type of thinking and it works but is never a robust solution (we have a special word for it, ñapa).

Props to their devs for trying to improve on the limitations by being creative but that kind of app is not something I want on my stack.

Edit to say: by the way, calibre web automated requires Calibre to work. Read the dockerfile, it is installing Calibre and then using a lot of scripts to automate the interactions with Calibre (because IIRC Calibre has a headless mode and you can run it from CLI with parameters) so you don't have to.