Books have been the awkward corner of the automation stack for a while now. Radarr and Sonarr hum along happily, and meanwhile book people have been nursing a Readarr install whose upstream metadata servers went dark, running two instances to keep audiobooks and eBooks apart, and pretending this was fine. It was not fine. 📚

Today we've got three bits of book news, and they all point the same direction.

Chaptarr: the one you've been waiting for

Chaptarr is the Readarr successor the book community has been asking us about for months, and it's now on the ElfHosted shelves. It started life as a Readarr fork and grew into its own project, and it fixes the two things that made Readarr painful:

• One instance, both formats. Audiobooks and eBooks in a single library, with separate root folders if you want them, and multi-edition support so the audiobook and eBook of the same title can live side by side. No more running two Readarrs like some sort of book-hoarding Gollum arguing with himself.
• Metadata that actually works. Chaptarr runs its own metadata pipeline, resolving books across multiple providers. Readarr's dead metadata servers are not part of the story anymore.

On top of that: narrator-aware matching, series management, optional MP3 to M4B conversion with chapters intact, and the same indexer / download client / quality profile workflow you already know from the rest of the *arr family. Prowlarr plugs straight in. Better still, your ElfHosted instance arrives pre-wired: indexers sync from Prowlarr automatically, download clients are already defined, and audiobook and eBook root folders are set up from first boot.

Chaptarr is $9/month standalone with the usual 7-day trial, and it's been added to the eBookWorm, AudioBookWorm, StoryBookWorm, and SuperBookWorm bundles at no extra cost. Setup docs are here.

We're putting our money where our bookmarks are, too: ElfHosted now maintains an ongoing monthly sponsorship of the Chaptarr developers, as we do for the other projects that make the platform hum.

Fair warning: upstream describes Chaptarr as beta. It's under active development with 11,000+ users and a good track record, but expect the occasional rough edge, and report anything odd in Discord so we can chase it upstream.

Grimmory takes over from BookLore in the bundles

You may have noticed BookLore's upstream story took a strange turn: the original developer deleted the project, and the community picked up the torch as Grimmory, a maintained fork that carries the same upload-native library, built-in reader, and OPDS support forward.

We've backed the fork. As of this week, the book bundles provision Grimmory where they previously provisioned BookLore. If you're a bundle subscriber, Grimmory is the same app under a new banner, and your library files stay exactly where they are. BookLore remains available as a standalone product for now, but Grimmory is where the maintenance (and our attention) lives.

Readarr sails into the West

And so we come to the farewell. The Servarr team retired Readarr upstream, its metadata servers are gone, and without them Readarr can't search or match anything anyway. We checked before writing this: not a single Elfie is actively using it. So there's no drawn-out sunset this time. Readarr and Readarr (Audiobooks) are retired from ElfHosted, effective now.

Here's the drill, and it's a pleasant one this time. There's no in-place database migration between the two, but you don't really want one anyway: subscribe to Chaptarr (or use the subscription switch), point it at your existing library folders, and let it import and match what you already have with metadata that resolves. Once you're happy, retire your Readarr subscription(s) and don't look back.

If you have an old Readarr library lying around and want a hand moving it into Chaptarr, open an #elf-help ticket and we'll walk you through it.

One library, both formats, working metadata. The books corner is finally tidy. 🤘