What are you guys running for this? I was looking around online and on the other site but everything seems either very new with few people saying anything or it’s a completely vibe coded project, or just dead. Some people are just recommending to instead do it on-device but where’s the fun in that if you have a server ;)
Cheers for any responses.
Surprised no one has mentioned Suwayomi yet for manga.
There’s a Mihon extension that treats Suwayomi as an additional “source” with progress syncing as well.
for manga I’m still running FMD2 via wine in a docker container. it works, but it’s clunky and outdated. that feeds into Komga, which in turn is pulled by Mihon/tachiyomi on my devices.
for books, I just manually search usenet and public trackers. books i;m managing manually at the moment. used to use ubooquity but I dont read a lot so I move files to my boox tablet when I need them.
since readarr is dead, i have been using bindery https://github.com/vavallee/bindery
Weird I know, but IMO it’s best to hand curate books and music (I have comics not manga, but same deal there). Automated tools can quickly rack up more books than you’ll read in a lifetime, and enough new music to listen to for a decade fits in a TB (even mostly FLAC). The problem then becomes finding what to read / listen to next, which gets worse with size.
That said, having a large local nonfiction book / journal article library can be useful to grep through, especially given current internet search problems.
Honestly that’s a good shout. For me I just want a convenient automated solution to download a couple books lol.
That second suggestion of yours is actually something I hadn’t thought about. I might do that someday actually.
If it’s just a couple of books, Anna’s Archive has your back.
I’ve been trialing Chaptarr (not affiliated officially with the ARR stack). Still new, so can report back with initial thoughts
I haven’t used it but recently discovered https://github.com/GodGMN/Komarr its still in early alpha but might be with keeping an eye on.
Bookorbit has a request feature since somewhat recently (tested it a bit and with search on MaM for English books I’ve gotten a 100% hit rate so far)… However its probably the project you mentioned as vibe coded and the dev has some controversies (they also made booklore which imploded spectacularly). It also has a ton of great features to sync with ereaders etc. I’ve been running it to manage a pretty big library and its been pretty solid.
Its definitely vibe coded, but the best thing for manga I’ve found so far is Rensaio. The dev is active and responsive.
It uses Tachiyomi/Mihon plugins so it’s fairly familiar if you’re used to that. Its fairly memory intensive, which is a downside, but it’s the best solution I’ve found so far.
I haven’t found an ebook solution yet, sadly.
Personally I am not entirely too happy with my setup, it is a bit unfinished but I haven’t been able to work on it too much lately and it is less urgent since I am basically the only one using it at home unlike other services. So with that said, here’s what I have so far.
For comics and manga, I have Komga to read from any device, user management, libraries handling… it is really nice but setting up content is as far as I know a manual task if you have it in different libraries. I access it from the browser in computers and tablets, but it also allows me to grab content from my ebook if I so want, the only issue is it won’t sync the reading I do (it could, but then I cannot sync the books to calibre, unless I keep switching the sync data).
For books I have used calibre for around 20 years so I come with some history there, but for a server is less than ideal, so I moved to calibre-web. That was working ok, but eventually found out about calibre web automated and had to try it. Now I am fully using that and it is fine but I can only have one library which is a slight annoyance but not a deal breaker for me.
And finally as the arr side of the set up I am using lazylibrarian. I have managed to get it connected to make downloads and import to calibreweb, I am not sure if the last changes are working with calibre web automated (cwa), but at least now it should be easier as cwa does the import itself with books found in a specific folder, so lazylibrarian doesn’t need to do any calibre library task. And of course it can only send to one place so my komga is not automated at all, only the books in cwa.
As a last note, I haven’t checked if any of those projects is using llms on their development, so I don’t vouch for them either way. And all I have said is just what I learnt in my process to build my own server so there might be (surely are) mistakes, misconceptions, and/or wrong opinions and info :)
Mihon to download, then ingest it somewhere that can understand mamga chapter/volumes.
Books and comics I do grab manually, as I haven’t found something that works super well.
However, I have started using Kapowarr for comic management and mass renaming to match the file/folder structure Komga expects. It is still lacking some features but the developer has been making steady progress on it and the only two major features I feel its missing are metadata creation, and torrent indexers. The latter of which should be part of the next version and may boost its ability to automate downloads. I can’t attest to its manga support as I don’t read any, but it grabs its metadata from comicvine so that will likely be the determining factor. The developer also only permits LLM generated code under rather strict rules iirc.
As for ebooks, I grab them from my chosen source and just use the upload button in calibre web automated. I haven’t found an automation tool worth using yet, but I do like to keep an organized library in case I want to revisit something or share it with someone else.
