Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app

Hey folks! This winter I've been building Citadel to scratch my itch of managing ebooks without using Calibre. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it's slow and awkward to use.

I dreamed of writing a native app (and originally tried this in Swift), but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri (Svelte on the frontend + Rust on the backend) to have a cross-platform desktop app. Plus, Citadel supports running in a headless / webbrowser mode. You can self-host a Citadel server that manages your library, and connect to it from anywhere with the web.

This is SUPER early software. Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed to post it here — but I wanted folks to know that I'm building a tool to replace Calibre. If you'd like to help build it, I'd love the help! If you just want to follow the journey, please do!

Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app
github.com

As an aside, some folks may ask "why write a new app instead of contributing to Calibre Web or a similar project?" It's a good question! Because I wanted to :)

Right now, this is a hobby project — I'm more interested in having fun building (rough!!) software than worried about extending existing projects. Plus, with how Citadel is designed to be backwards compatible with Calibre, you can continue to use Calibre Web.

As well, I've organized the backend so that all the Calibre-facing code is its own library, which (in the future!) others can use for their own projects. A Calibre library CLI, anyone?

Interesting

> "why write a new app"

I'd imagine spearheading a ground up rewrite of their UI would be a lot more work too.

thanks for taking this on! calibre is a pita for me to use, and I know what I'm doing. makes it impossible to recommend to anyone, whether they're my grandparents or asavvy tech person.

Love the project. Calibre is absolutely an amazing tool, but it never really adapted into the whole self-hosted era. I really like the focus on maintaining compatibility with the Calibre library. Personally the features I use the most are the folder watching and automatic book conversion.

Now if there was support for multiple Calibre libraries...