Since inception, we've offered a combination of Calibre and Calibre-Web, which work hand-in-hand to manage your eBook library. I've personally used Calibre-Web for years to split "currently reading" accounts for my family, and lean heavily on its ability to "send-to-kindle" books to each family member.

Calibre is very much a desktop app, and while we did have a Kasm-based VNC-in-browser implementation to allow you to manage it, it's awkward to use, especially on mobile devices.

Calibre-Web, however, being a web UI, works very well, and can be themed to look a bit like Plex!

Development on Calibre-Web was stalled for a while, and while it seems to have picked up again, Calibre-Web is intended to be used alongside a full Calibre UI instance, as opposed to standalone.

Calibre-Web Automated is a set of enhancements for Calibre-Web, which "bridge the gap", making it possible to fully manage your remote ebook library without requiring Calibre at all.

Our Calibre-Web product has been updated to Calibre-Web-Automated, which brings a lot of new UX features, including (summarized, see full list here):

  • Automatic Imports
  • Automatic Conversion 🔃
  • A Weighted Conversion Algorithm: ⚖️
  • 28 Supported file types for conversion
  • Automatic Enforcement of Changes made to Covers & Metadata through the Calibre-Web UI! 👀📔
  • One Step Full Library Conversion 🔂 - Any format -> .epub
  • Library Auto-Detect 📚🕵️
  • Easy Dark/ Light Mode Switching ☀️🌙
  • Batch Editing & Deletion! 🗂️🗄️

What about storage for ebooks?

We don't provide storage for user content, but it's now free to attach any rclone-compatible storage to your stack, and given the size of ebooks, you can probably do it for effectively "free" using Google Drive, AWS S3, B2, etc! 🎉

I'm sold, how do I do it?

You can grab a Calibre-Web stack, with a 7-day free trial, below: