[sureglymop]

Question: would Zotero be good as a kind of "digital library"? Like nextcloud but for books. I often buy PDFs and books but they just end up on a file share, way less useful than my actual bookshelf. I mean as an alternative to something like calibre (which I don't particularly like). Also, is zotero open source?

[cxr]

Yes. I recommend Zotero as an alternative to Calibre frequently, and while reading your comment I was going to make a comparison before I even got to the part that mentions Calibre by name.

I started out using using Zotero during lockdowns after having known about it for years. The landing page and Wikipedia article never really sold me on it before—"A reference manager? Why do I want that?" Now I use it for collecting everything that isn't a good fit for the native bookmarks manager in Firefox (which is a lot more than what Chrome's bookmarks manager is good for, but still). Having started using it, it's great for other stuff like archiving Web pages and good enough to create/manage lists of books.

You might also be interested in a recent Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app <https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel>

I still think it would be a great idea of Citadel were able to work as a Zotero add-on/distribution that was specifically designed with e-books in mind.

[setopt]

Zotero is open source (unlike most alternatives in this space like Mendeley, Papers, etc.). It is also less locked-down in that it offers a plug-in system with many useful third-party plugins.

I have used Zotero as a digital library for years and it works great for that. Especially since the iPad companion app is pretty good for reading and annotating, while I prefer collecting and organizing on the computer.

My main issues has been that the interface has been an eye sore on MacOS, and that it can be quite slow when searching large data bases. But I’m really excited that this update seems to fix both interface and performance.

[cxr]

Zotero and, previously, the UI updates to MonoDevelop (Xamarin Studio) are both proof that in order to get the best UI for all platforms, you should work on making it look decent-to-good (if not perfectly suited) for Mac OS and then just use the same look for Windows and Linux. You won't be able to completely avoid it seeming at least somewhat out of place on the latter two, but it also won't look bad.