Colibri—a self-hostable web application to manage your (and your family's) ebook library, intended as a companion to Calibre. I want it to be a friendly, simple, capable, opinionated app to review your books, add metadata to them, get them onto your reader, share them with family and (few) friends, create a public shelf for bragging, connect with Goodreads etc., and exchange comments and reviews on books.
This is explicitly not intended to ever be monetised, and I enjoy all the implications that has on the design. Colibri is as much a tool I personally want to use, as it is a study in small-audience user interfaces, and the quest to build the perfect book catalog schema.
I'm looking for fellow book-loving people to work on Colibri, to create the best personal digital library possible. If you're interested, feel free to reach out via email (in bio), or on GitHub.
A fan chiming in. I'm really happy someone someone is tackling this and it's looking good. One thing: can we get a demo instance just for initial snooping? A screenshot or two is fine but to get a feel for features it would be nice to have something (even heavily limited) we can just interact with?
That's the first thing I'm going to do as soon as it's possible! I recently refactored the code base to a monorepo, and still need to make some adjustments so it'll run stable again. Stay tuned :)
Ebooks in an S3 compatible storage bucket, metadata in a Postgres database. That has the huge advantage of being able to do full text search and kNN similarity right in the database, for example.
Colibri is built around a pretty solid data schema (I hope). Check out the migrations folder if you’re curious :-)
LLMs might make sense to interact with your collection, so that could find its way into the app at some point. Plus, I've been experimenting with generating llms.txt for all routes to point your own LLM to.
On the other hand, I'm concerned with LLMs quite intensely at work, so it's nice to spend some time with plain, honest-to-god SQL for now!
Ooh, this looks fantastic. I'd love to help, but I'm spending almost all of my off-work hours looking for jobs right now. Maybe I'll find a good one sooner rather than later...
Great stuff, has been meaning to create an online library of my burgeoning ebooks collections for quite som time now, this is exactly what the doctors ordered and it's based on Postgres.
Just wondering about the encrypted collection of ebooks from Kindle for example. Are these ebooks supported and does it only supports metadata, what about the content search for these ebooks?
So, Colibri is intended to be a companion to Calibre, maybe do like 80% of what it does, but not all of it. Also, I want Colibri's core to have a fully clean collar: It handles your personal books, but will not be able to automatically de-DRM books and such. However, the way book assets work, you're of course free to just attach an encrypted AZW3 file to a book!
> Are these ebooks supported and does it only supports metadata, what about the content search for these ebooks?
Have you seen https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/issues/45? Content search is planned, but requires access to a book's text content, obviously. My recommendation would be to use Calibre to strip DRM and convert the books to epub/mobi files, and import those to Colibri; this has the general benefit of ensuring access to content you bought without depending on Amazon's good will :-)
Colibri—a self-hostable web application to manage your (and your family's) ebook library, intended as a companion to Calibre. I want it to be a friendly, simple, capable, opinionated app to review your books, add metadata to them, get them onto your reader, share them with family and (few) friends, create a public shelf for bragging, connect with Goodreads etc., and exchange comments and reviews on books.
This is explicitly not intended to ever be monetised, and I enjoy all the implications that has on the design. Colibri is as much a tool I personally want to use, as it is a study in small-audience user interfaces, and the quest to build the perfect book catalog schema.
I'm looking for fellow book-loving people to work on Colibri, to create the best personal digital library possible. If you're interested, feel free to reach out via email (in bio), or on GitHub.