According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone. I found a copy of the announcement:
Announcement
📢 A note on where things stand
ACX has made the decision to close BookLore and step away. He has a partner, a new chapter of his life ahead of him, and honestly - building something that reached 10k stars and thousands of daily users is something to be proud of. We wish him well.
That said - this community, and this project, is bigger than any one person. That’s the whole point of open source.
So here’s what’s happening next:
A group of the original contributors - the people who built a lot of what you’ve been using - are continuing the work under a new name. [PROJECT NAME TBD] is that continuation. Same mission. Better foundation. Governed the way an open source project should be: transparently, collaboratively, and with the community at the center.
We’re not starting from zero. We’re starting from everything this community has already built together.
If you want to be part of what comes next, come join us: 👉 https://discord.gg/FwqHeFWk
More details - name, repo, roadmap - coming very shortly. Thank you for your patience, and thank you for giving a damn about this project. That’s exactly why it’s worth continuing.
Oh goddamn it, I deployed this like five days ago. Been working on digitizing my whole collection for the past week cuz I liked it so much. Fuck lol.
Uh, anyone know any good alternatives???
On my server I have Calibre Web Automated, Komga, and Kavita setup. I started with CWA for epubs and it’s been pretty great especially for syncing metadata that, with the recent update, has gotten better. The downside I’ve had is with comics. It supports them but there’s currently no support for writing metadata for .cbr or .cbz so trying to sync or update metadata errors out. Sometimes it saves it, but a lot of the time it errors out for me. Which is why I spun up Komga and Kavita. They’re both good for comics, manga, and books. Plus the UI on both is nice. However, they both don’t sync metadata as well as CWA. I think there’s another container you can create to write metadata for Komga and Kavita, but I had no luck with it. Eventually I’ll decide on just one, but so far, I’m undecided on which one I like the most.
I’ve been using Calibre (not the web version tho) to fetch metadata and better covers and create .opf files before I upload to my server anyway. Kavita’s documentation says it will import metadata from an opf in the same folder, so it should work out of the box, yes?
Honestly Calibre has a LOT of features that I don’t ever use, which is why I wasn’t planning on running CWA. I don’t have any comics, but between Komga and Kavita, which would you say is better for books (most of mine are epub format)?
What’s the work flow life for CWA? I currently use calibre-web (kobosync) and calibre to organize and polish then drag and drop the epubs to calibre-web. There has to be a better way lol
The only lesson to be learned from this is disclosure. If AI is so good/bad don’t hide the fact that you are using it. End of story. Let people make their decisions based off that.
Shame, it was a great project. Guess I’ll be migrating to calibre-web automated.
Good riddance.
Has anyone used Komga as an alternative? It’s primarily for manga and comics but it seems to support books too (epub and PDF). It also seems to be able to sync books with Kobo devices.
I set up Komga as soon as the original reddit thread went up about the Booklore dev. Works great, pretty simple, does what it needs to do, and setting up Kobo sync for my wife took all of 5 minutes.
I will say, even given all the drama around the original creator in the last few weeks, Booklore has a solid front end experience, is quite flexible, and generally stable app. It’s a bummer the creator acted childishly (again and again), but I know I’ll be looking to use whatever the v2 of this becomes.
Oh well guess I’ll continue using audiobookshelf.
Well, that went downhill very fast. Very sad. I liked the UI too; it was a good way to manage a collection; and it synced with my Kobo pretty easily.
I hope those who have the ability to do so will create something from its ashes.
I liked the UI too
It looked like a very solid UI. In fact, so much so that I’ve toyed with the idea of deploying it.
