So over the years I have purchased eBooks from Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, and also directly from the websites of some authors. I have over 1,100 eBooks with Kobo alone and it is by far my largest source of content. I have Japanese light novels, various classical novels, present day novels, and manga just to list a few.
Privacy and maintaining ownership of what I have purchased has always been important to me and to say it has been a hard to do so would be a gross understatement. There are many reasons why I don’t feel comfortable with my content solely hosted on someone else’s servers/services.
It has been a long time in the works but I finally feel that I have a solid solution for my use case. The journey definitely had some difficulties and I had to explore a lot of information to get everything to work. As such I thought the details of my setup/solution may be helpful to someone, some day, and wanted to share.
Home Server
I run Ubuntu Server 22.04 with the LXDE desktop environment on one of my old gaming rigs as my home server. I also have a file share (SMB) setup for all my of files. Finally I have remote access setup for me to log-in (I have to use the remote access to load eBooks onto my eReader with my current setup).
Calibre
I use Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) to manage my eBooks. I’ve downloaded copies of all my purchased eBooks and used Calibre to remove the DRM, update the properties, and also remotely move the eBooks to my eReader. Sadly Calibre doesn’t behave well with shares, and my server is downstairs, so that is why I decided to use KOreader.
Installation: I used Calibre’s binary install directions from their website to install on my Home Server.
Calibre-Web
To avoid having to remote access the server every time I want to look at my eBook library, update the properties on a couple of eBooks, or add a couple of eBooks I installed Calibre-Web (https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web). As the name suggests it create a web interface over top of Calbre that I can access from any machine in my house. I can’t mass send eBooks to my eReader through Calibre-Web but I can download individual books and copy and paste them to the eReader locally if I wanted.
Installation: I used the pip installation instructions on their github page to install Calibre-Web on my Home Server.
Kobo eReader
Due to acceptable functionality with KOreader, the fact it isn’t Amazon, and that a significant portion of my eBook collection has been purchased through Kobo I decided that my next eBook reader would be another Kobo, specifically a Clara BW. I was also looking at a Pocketbook Verse (non-pro) which better accommodates KOreader (from my understanding) but the environmental and library considerations of the Kobo Clara won me over.
KOreader
From KOreader’s website (https://koreader.rocks/) “KOreader is a document viewer for E Ink devices…. It’s available for Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, Android and desktop Linux.” Basically you open KOreader on your eReader and it gives you a new interface to read your eBooks. For me, pushing my DRM free and reorganized eBooks into the Kobo eReader with Calbire and then using Kobo’s OS was acceptable but I had to connect the eReader to the server (as mentioned above). KOreader supports wireless transfer with Calibre so I can remote into the server, start up Calibre and then connect the eReader wirelessly and push a mass amount of books without going near the server.
Installation: I used the Semi-Automatic Installation Method for Kobo found on KOreader’s wiki (https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices) to install KOreader on my Kobo eReader.
Installation: I used the Manual Installation Method based on KFMon for Kobo found on KOreader’s wiki (https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Kobo-devices) to install KOreader on my Kobo eReader.
Edit Note: Freezing issues with KOreader and the Kobo eReader resulted in having to factory reset the Kobo eReader and then reinstall KOreader using the manual installation method mentioned above. Since changing the installation method I haven’t experienced any freezing issues.