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Show HN: LibreRead 1.0 – Self-Hosted Free Ebook Reader

by mysticmode on 12/11/17, 2:47 PM with 83 comments

• by TAForObvReasons on 12/11/17, 4:52 PM

      Features
      - Built using Golang
  

  More general commentary: For people actually using the software, is the implementation language really a feature?

  EDIT: to be clear, I'm not attacking go as a language but rather the general trend of citing the implementation language as a feature when the audience is more than just "developers"

• by sundarurfriend on 12/11/17, 3:39 PM

  Looking at the demo (why does it show the demo login details to have us copy-paste it, instead of autofilling it or even auto-logging in?), I feel like they tweaked the mobile interface a little bit and serve it for the desktop, and called it 'responsive design'. Basic actions like 'Add new books' are hidden in a hamburger menu over at a corner, easily overlooked on a desktop, and the menu fills up the whole screen when expanded, despite having only four options.

  I like the idea, but an explanation or a FAQ would be much more useful than a small list of vague bullet points. It looks like it takes PDFs and epubs and serves them as HTML - but PDF conversion is particularly tricky and prone to failure. Are there options to tweak the conversion like in Calibre, to work around badly formatted PDFs (which seems to be most of them)? How does it handle figures, or tables that are too large for a given mobile screen? Can it fetch covers and/or metadata for books if necessary? Answering some use-case questions like these can give users a better feel for the scope and goals of the project.

• by orblivion on 12/11/17, 4:51 PM

  If this gets good reception, would you consider adapting this for Sandstorm.io? Seems like it would be fitting:

  https://apps.sandstorm.io/genre/Media

• by acabal on 12/11/17, 10:44 PM

  Awesome project!

  I see you're using ebooks from the project I lead, Standard Ebooks, in your front page screenshot. Glad to see you're liking our work, and keep up your own good work!

  Drop me a line if you need any help with epub compatibility/quirks :)

• by rahimnathwani on 12/11/17, 5:03 PM

  I really like full-text search for books. Currently I use:

  - Safari Books Online: expensive, and only works with books on their platform

  - Recoll: libre/free, and can search a local book collection. Built as a desktop app, although there's at least one web client[0]

  If either LibreRead or one of the Recoll web UIs can match the speed and UI of Safari's full-text search, I'll be very happy.

  [0] I haven't tried it, because it didn't occur to me to look for one until today: https://github.com/koniu/recoll-webui

• by cdancette on 12/11/17, 4:29 PM

  It would be great if we could integrate it with some ereader (kobo, Kindle).

  I don't really like reading ebooks on my desktop or mobile

• by hammerandtongs on 12/11/17, 8:08 PM

  If this were designed to seamlessly interoperate with Calibre (a filesystem and sqlite3 iirc) this would be potentially useful to me.

  I could more confidently selfhost a web version of my calibre library for reading and bookmarking. Calibre has a web version but I'm not confident in it and would be uninclined to host it even in a sandstorm instance for example.

  The memory issues of libreread, as indicated by others, are too much for hosting in a friendly way with other apps. The value of full text search isn't nearly good enough to warrant the memory usage. Aim for < 60MB serverside.

  Calibre has an large amount of features that are critical for people actually trying to maintain an ebook library. Those features have been added and polished over a decade. I'm very doubtful they can be replicated in a reasonable timeframe.

  Valuable to see people making things in this area though! Cheers.

• by thisisit on 12/11/17, 4:27 PM

  I have been using Google Books for my reading. And that is just for one reason - all my highlights and notes are stored in Google Docs. You can use the doc to build your summaries or quickly read through all the highlights/notes.

  I have yet to find a reader which can do this.

• by lostmsu on 12/11/17, 4:52 PM

  You could make a reader as a static website: just sync data to Google Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive. I have a simple EPub reader doing exactly that: https://h5reader.azurewebsites.net/

• by gravypod on 12/12/17, 2:25 AM

  Does this track current page in PDFs? I had a quick look and it seems like this feature is supported for epub files.

  I maintain, for personal use, a self-hosted web service that does something similar to this. In my custom service I split each PDF into a collection of images. This lets me download limited sets of the book (10-page chunks) for quick load times and also lets me remember which page was the last one I was reading.

  A similar feature in something like this would be cool. Automatically extract the image from the page, transcode it into the best format supported by the browser, and remember which page is being read (regardless of the source book format).

• by bane on 12/12/17, 2:22 AM

  This is really nice and I'm definitely planning on giving it a looksee. I currently use Ubooquity since it's a very simply no-fuss reader that works fantastic on tablets and has pretty good format support. I currently have about 40,000 books, magazines and comics setup under it and I like generally how it works (with a few small problems that aren't deal breakers). Installing it involves running a jar file and that's it, so this looks pretty heavy to get setup.

  One thing I really wish I could do with it (LibreRead or Ubooquity) is "add" books from the internet archive to it either as virtual links that simply opened up to the IA reader on their site, or with an option to download locally within the reader interface.

• by JustSomeNobody on 12/11/17, 5:20 PM

  Nice. This has been on my side project ToDo list for some time. I may need to clear that off now.

  Thanks for this.

• by motdiem on 12/11/17, 8:03 PM

  I like the idea of having full text search, though I wonder how it behaves on large libraries... Calibre is great for managing a library, but not so much at searching through a large amount of books....

• by one87 on 12/11/17, 4:43 PM

  1GB memory min. That's heavy :/

• by dsr_ on 12/11/17, 4:23 PM

  Off the top of my head, this needs:

  Table of Contents support with working links; per-user storable bookmarks; font and color control; margin control; multiple methods of page turning; a non-bookshelf library index (I have over a thousand authors, most of whom have more than one book -- any interface needs to be usable by someone with a library of ten thousand books); and probably a partridge in a pear tree.

  But it looks like a good core on which to build.

• by rkachowski on 12/11/17, 6:27 PM

  I'd really like a project like this that could read mobi files. There's also calibre-web[1] which also has a nice mobile interface and also doesn't support mobi. I don't know what it is about the structure of this file that is so resistant to be parsed.

  [1]https://github.com/janeczku/calibre-web

• by cmurf on 12/12/17, 12:58 AM

  Keep all your ebooks in one place. Access it on any device.

  But then it supports PDF and EPUB, neither of which are directly supported by Kindle, they have to be converted first. So is LibreRead converting to AZW, or to HTML such that the Kindle's permanently experimental web browser can display it?

• by Tharkun on 12/11/17, 6:13 PM

  Can I use it to store/read nasty formats and nasty DRM from actual ebook vendors like Amazon and Kobo?

• by jcoffland on 12/11/17, 5:19 PM

  I'd line to have an high quality TTS engine integrated with the ereader. Google's TTS API would work well for this.

• by realusername on 12/12/17, 5:49 AM

  Is there any way I can help with some translation? I would use it for people who don't speak English at all.

• by rplnt on 12/11/17, 4:23 PM

  It works with the epub book in the demo, but with the pdf one, it just opens the whole pdf file in my viewer.

• by Quanttek on 12/11/17, 6:50 PM

  short question: what can you people recommend as eBook reader for one's computer? One that allows me to mark stuff and add comments? So far most readers I saw were low in usability or feature-set. Bonus if also available on mobile

• by xchip on 12/11/17, 8:40 PM

  Nice! Why did you use golang over other programming languages?

• by avryhof on 12/11/17, 5:16 PM

  I'll stick to Calbre