Features
- Built using Golang
EDIT: to be clear, I'm not attacking go as a language but rather the general trend of citing the implementation language as a feature when the audience is more than just "developers"
The same goes with "Easy Installation". The end user doesn't care if the install or easy or hard.
You have to consider the dependencies, resource requirements, and manageability of anything you host.
I hosted owncloud, tiny-tiny-rss, seafile, and some others. It was a nightmare to install any of these, then I installed gitea. That was EASY, REALLY EASY. No need to install and configure php, python2/3 and compile some modules for it.
With gitea you could just launch binary and it works, that's all. And compiling it from sources was just one command.
As a non-Go programmer, with absolutely no inclinations to get into it in the near future, I will happily accept a fast, self-contained Go binary over many other stacks.
Btw, I have never wrote go besides playing around with web server tutorial recently.
If only someone can recommend me a chat service that is just as easy to configure as Gogs. Mattermost requires its own domain :(
I don't really like reading ebooks on my desktop or mobile
Just yesterday I wanted to order the new Kindle Oasis because I think the hardware is perfect (good to hold, physical buttons, …) but was told by a coworker just before ordering it can‘t open .epub files.
Edit: Thanks for all the tips about .epub + Kindle. I just found out that there also is an option to install Software like KOReader[1] if one wants to go the Jailbreak route.
I was doing this with a Kindle Paperwhite.
https://github.com/koreader/koreader
and a newer one that the developer just announced in a Reddit rust group:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/7iu7q8/plato_a_docume...
It does get much heavier (recommended 2 GB) if you enable full-text search with Elasticsearch. The metadata-search only capability was added to get the memory requirements lower.
I have yet to find a reader which can do this.
Would love any feedback, if you have it :)
- Safari Books Online: expensive, and only works with books on their platform
- Recoll: libre/free, and can search a local book collection. Built as a desktop app, although there's at least one web client[0]
If either LibreRead or one of the Recoll web UIs can match the speed and UI of Safari's full-text search, I'll be very happy.
[0] I haven't tried it, because it didn't occur to me to look for one until today: https://github.com/koniu/recoll-webui
Table of Contents support with working links; per-user storable bookmarks; font and color control; margin control; multiple methods of page turning; a non-bookshelf library index (I have over a thousand authors, most of whom have more than one book -- any interface needs to be usable by someone with a library of ten thousand books); and probably a partridge in a pear tree.
But it looks like a good core on which to build.
LibreRead supports both metadata search and full-text search. (Though the latter requires a lot more RAM.)
Not sure how feasible it is with pdfs though. Maybe I would just not include them in the demo, I don't think it's a common ebook format anyway.
I like the idea, but an explanation or a FAQ would be much more useful than a small list of vague bullet points. It looks like it takes PDFs and epubs and serves them as HTML - but PDF conversion is particularly tricky and prone to failure. Are there options to tweak the conversion like in Calibre, to work around badly formatted PDFs (which seems to be most of them)? How does it handle figures, or tables that are too large for a given mobile screen? Can it fetch covers and/or metadata for books if necessary? Answering some use-case questions like these can give users a better feel for the scope and goals of the project.
When I clicked a PDF link it opened in FireFox's PDF viewer. Thought that was odd/a bug. I checked it out because I would like a ePub/PDF reader that works on any machine I have access to and can connect to a machine running this but at first glance it needs a little work. Still, I'll check in a few weeks from now, it's a good idea if they can overcome the issues you mentioned and make sure things render consistently.
I see you're using ebooks from the project I lead, Standard Ebooks, in your front page screenshot. Glad to see you're liking our work, and keep up your own good work!
Drop me a line if you need any help with epub compatibility/quirks :)
But then it supports PDF and EPUB, neither of which are directly supported by Kindle, they have to be converted first. So is LibreRead converting to AZW, or to HTML such that the Kindle's permanently experimental web browser can display it?
I could more confidently selfhost a web version of my calibre library for reading and bookmarking. Calibre has a web version but I'm not confident in it and would be uninclined to host it even in a sandstorm instance for example.
The memory issues of libreread, as indicated by others, are too much for hosting in a friendly way with other apps. The value of full text search isn't nearly good enough to warrant the memory usage. Aim for < 60MB serverside.
Calibre has an large amount of features that are critical for people actually trying to maintain an ebook library. Those features have been added and polished over a decade. I'm very doubtful they can be replicated in a reasonable timeframe.
Valuable to see people making things in this area though! Cheers.
I maintain, for personal use, a self-hosted web service that does something similar to this. In my custom service I split each PDF into a collection of images. This lets me download limited sets of the book (10-page chunks) for quick load times and also lets me remember which page was the last one I was reading.
A similar feature in something like this would be cool. Automatically extract the image from the page, transcode it into the best format supported by the browser, and remember which page is being read (regardless of the source book format).
One thing I really wish I could do with it (LibreRead or Ubooquity) is "add" books from the internet archive to it either as virtual links that simply opened up to the IA reader on their site, or with an option to download locally within the reader interface.
Thanks for this.