Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

111–120 of 163 posts

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

#111

How was your experience with Tauri? I'm loving Rust and would like a lightweight web backend (like Flask in Python) to use with Rust.

Tauri has been excellent. Occasionally I have to do some GitHub issues spelunking to find answers to issues, but that's common with piece of tech. Overall it's been great and I'll happily use it again.

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

#112

Anyone else having trouble building and running it (Ubuntu 23.10)? > thread 'main' panicked at libcalibre/src/infrastructure/domain/book/repository.rs:20:62: called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: ()

Yes — sorry! I hadn't pushed local changes yet. I didn't expect a big reception!

`main` is up-to-date now and SHOULD be building. Feel free to email me (phil at denhoff dot ca) if you run into issues, or add a GitHub issue.

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

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question! My main use for Calibre has been to collect my epubs (mostly) in one place, and occasionally sync them to my ereader. When I add books, I need to grab metadata for the book like title, ISBN, etc. Citadel will (and does) support editing metadata for books — titles, authors, (in future) tags, custom columns. That’s certain. Syncing to devices will come too, in time, as will downloading metadata from onli…

One feature that would be great is being able to sync/upload the metadata to something like a Bookwyrm[1] instance (there's apparently a `/create-book` endpoint for this) - trying to find and retype all the information from, e.g., Amazon is a pain. [1] https://github.com/bookwyrm-social/bookwyrm

A BookWyrm plugin is a great idea!

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

#114
post #58

This looks really cool and I plan on checking it out. Ironically, I recently built a desktop app using the same stack (Rust + Tauri + Svelte) for managing audiobooks . Shameless plug in case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker

I'll be looking at your project for inspo :) Thanks for sharing!

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

#115

Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/ ` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device. For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo. I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I di…

Yeah I was quite surprised when I found out that that works! I thought Calibre was doing something special. That's why Citadel has a "copy to folder" — you can copy an ebook to an external drive. I'm not sure that it's really easier than just opening the folder to copy + paste it, but Citadel updates a metadata file Calibre uses when detecting what books are on the device to avoid having to read every file in the folder.

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

#116
post #58

This looks really cool and I plan on checking it out. Ironically, I recently built a desktop app using the same stack (Rust + Tauri + Svelte) for managing audiobooks . Shameless plug in case anyone is interested: https://gitlab.com/fonner/audiobook-locker#audiobook-locker

I'll be looking at your project for inspo :) Thanks for sharing!

If you guys could become best friends and integrate both projects into one ultimate ebook/audiobook tool, that would be great :)

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

#118

does it mangle japanese titles/authors by transcribing to pinyin chinese like calibre does? do the drm plugins work? might check it out and switch.

Good lord, no. Does Calibre do that? My greatest fear is having to build bad things like that for backwards compatibility, because Calibre would require it.

While I haven't tested non-ASCII titles, there is no reason it shouldn't support it. I'm planning on doing some perf testing today and I'll make sure I test global names.

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

#119

Yesterday I realized that I can just copy an epub to a directory on my Kobo reader to the `root/ ` of the mountpoint in /media/oakhaven/koboreader (on Ubunutu 22.04). It will show up in the list of books on the device. For some reason I thought that uploading books to the Kobo reader was somehow complicated, and I only used Caliber to get books from laptop to Kobo. I know Calibre has lots of other functions, but I di…

Its been forever since I set it up but you can also sync via ssh, so, wirelessly recursively sync a directory.

I think I loaded my books over USB, then synced daily news and additional books via rsync. Some of the content was auto generated and dumped into the dir like some auto fetch and email subscriptions, some was manual like copying in a new book after purchase.

But its not a very complicated problem, calibre just does a ton of other stuff too outside of copying books into a specific folder structure.

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

#120

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.…

It's slightly sad that you have to give this disclaimer, especially on a forum for hackers. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from a John Carmack commencement speech:

"In many areas, it's almost received wisdom that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel. But I would urge you to occasionally try anyways. You'll be better for the effort, and this is how eventually we get better wheels. By people just going ahead and trying."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZnqjHkULc

Post reply on HN