Honestly, I’m personally not just after a self hosting solution, I’m mostly trying to replace US services and companies. As part of that, I’ve started using Jellyfin and I think it’s great but the book library part is a bit clunky.
I think I’ve got three use cases:
- Research papers
- Textbooks
- Novels / Non-fiction
I’m okay with three separate setups for these too. I do listen to quite a few audiobooks but they’re currently independent and I’m happy to keep it that way. I’m happy to hear integrated solutions, or suggestions for an audio book library, but this post is focused on the above list.
The main device I’d do most of my reading on is an iPhone but I’d also be wanting to open up the research papers and textbooks on my MacBook. I’d want to be able to add research papers from the iPhone, or at least a light weight way to list them to quickly add later.
Note taking and highlighting isn’t an issue, I’ve started using markdown for this. Syncing how much of the book I’ve read is. Ideally between devices but on the one device would work too.
I figure I’ll have to drop some of my aims here but I thought I’d see if anyone knows of decent setups to try. Neither Jellyfin or Calibre seem amazing but maybe I could just configure them better.
Since there is a mandated image here I’m starting to wonder if I’m really in the wrong place, but I put textbook cover there
My recommendation for research papers would be Zotero. You have the option of using their cloud (free and paid tiers are available) or you can simply point it at where you’d like to store your documents (this will be up to personal preference, I’ve seen it done using sync tools and self-hosted “clouds” such as Nextcloud).
I’ve personally been using Zotero for just over 6 or 7 years and it’s honestly been such a game changer for my productivity. Not only does it help keep track of my research, but it also has a very robust plugin ecosystem (such as automatically fetching missing DOIs, more advanced file renaming, fetching stats on papers such as how frequently it’s been cited, etc.).
I’d be happy to help you get it setup if you give it a shot and run into any issues!
WebDAV is probably the easiest for syncing the actual articles. I use some standalone server whose name I can’t recall but there’s a bunch of options.
I also use calibre-web for accessing articles through koreader + opds on a Kobo ereader, although this is a manual process and could probably be refined.