As a hardcore data hoarder, I prefer to store my media files locally rather than relying on online platforms. Fortunately, the home lab ecosystem has dozens of apps that make managing, archiving, and browsing my carefully collected digital library much easier. There’s Jellyfin (and I guess Plex too) for my TV shows and movies, while RomM organizes my collection of retro game files and Immich takes care of all the footage I’ve captured over the years.
But aside from these voluminous files, I also have thousands of e-books that, despite taking up a fraction of the size of my movie collection, are still a real pain in the ass. Luckily, I came across Caliber-Web during my days as a novice homelab, and it quickly became the centerpiece of my bibliophile setup.
Caliber-Web is the self-hosted antidote to my ebook management problems
It hides various file organization tools under that elegant web user interface.
Truth be told, as someone who doesn’t really like the outdated UI on the Caliber desktop app, I was a little wary of using Caliber-Web when I first deployed the app. However, Caliber-Web’s user interface looks much more modern compared to its desktop version and includes many e-book organization tools to avoid turning my digital library into a mess. To start, Caliber-Web analyzes metadata as soon as I upload a new ebook, and this includes everything from the cover image and description to its unique identification number(s) and other publication details. Additionally, I can fill in missing metadata fields and insert tags and series IDs to make my ebooks easier to find.
Caliber-Web also allows me to segregate e-books of different genres into shelves, where I can rearrange, share, and download them en masse. I’ve even created dedicated user profiles for the other book-loving inhabitants of my household, so we don’t end up mixing up our e-book collections. Another interesting aspect of Caliber-Web is that it can detect books with similar metadata during the initial upload process and has saved me from adding duplicates on countless occasions. Its search functionality is also quite detailed and I can filter ebooks using tags, publication dates, reading status, and several other fields. Caliber-Web even allows me to mark books I’ve eaten and I can archive them to prevent users from accidentally deleting them. While we’re on this topic…
Its integrated reader and OPDS power support are very useful
Instead of forcing me to download a dedicated app to read my archived digital media, Caliber-Web has a built-in e-book reader, one that natively supports .txt, .epub, and .pdf files. On paper, this may seem somewhat restrictive, but Caliber-Web supports dozens of ebook formats. And once I combine Caliber-Web with a self-hosted server BentoPDF container, a document editor that allows me to convert different formats to the good old .pdf, I can read most of my library directly from the Caliber-Web user interface. Additionally, since Caliber-Web is a browser-based tool, I can access my e-books from virtually any device in my home lab.
Better yet, Caliber-Web supports OPDS clients, making it quite accessible for members of my family who prefer conventional Android apps over a web-based interface. With a little help from send2reader, I can even send eBooks from Caliber-Web to Kobo and Kindle devices.
I have used Proxmox to deploy my Caliber-Web instance
However, transferring the metadata.db file required some effort.
When I first heard about Caliber-Web, my first instinct was to set it up on my TrueNAS storage platform, since my e-books still take up a few dozen GB. But after constantly running into write permission issues while configuring the library data set for the eBook management service, I decided to ditch my dreams of a NAS-powered Caliber-Web and switched to a Docker container running inside a virtual machine on my home Proxmox server.
But as expected, I ended up running out of space on my VM and my virtualization experiments didn’t help on the resource consumption front either. So, I migrated my Caliber-Web setup to an LXC using the Proxmox VE-Helper Scripts repository a few months ago. But instead of rebuilding the database from scratch, I downloaded the old one from the VM, pushed it to the Proxmox host via SCP, and then used the copy command to move it to the /home directory on my LXC. I also ran the chmod command to grant full read/write access to the database.
As for eBooks, I’ve always used the Upload button to send new .pdf and .epub files to the app, although I had to enable it again via the Feature Settings tab of the Edit Basic Settings section of the admin panel on my new LXC-based Caliber-Web server.
But it’s not the only bibliophile app in my arsenal.
Kavita and Audiobookshelf have their own utility
As much as I love Caliber-Web, I must admit that I also use other self-hosted tools for my digital library. While Caliber-Web can technically organize comics, Kavita lets me search for graphic novels and manga from its built-in reader. Plus, its user interface is much better for reading and managing comics. Meanwhile, performs a similar task for my audiobooks and podcasts, with allowing me to download the latter in bulk from my favorite YouTube channels.
