[NoMoreNicksLeft]

The last time I was involved in a thread like this, I was banned from r/plex.

I pointed out that Plex should do ebooks. It is a natural fit. They keep track of how far in a series or a show you are, they could keep track of where you are in a book. Many of the Plex idioms transfer well. It has a clear visual style that helps you to pick out the shows you might try, or shows like those you've already watched.

BUT IT'S NOT EVEN MEDIA, YOU'RE STUPID

Books were the first media, you must be illiterate.

WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ BOOKS ON MY BIGSCREEN TV!

Plex runs on my iPhone. And on yours too.

[banhammered]

But if you need more than one feature, I'm sure that in 10 or 15 minutes I could come up with a 90 page list of features. Without even trying.

>I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option

Well shit. Even you can come up with one thing. Plex was awesome, and then Plex wanted to be the shittiest version of whatever CBS is calling their streaming service.

[majora2007]

I just want to throw out that you might like Kavita for a comic/book server. It's built to feel like Plex. https://www.kavitareader.com/

I do agree that Plex doesn't seem like a good fit for books and comics. The first major hurdle is the lack of a singular metadata source that Plex can hook into for metadata - although this year has shifted with Hardcover and MangaBaka. Plex also uses a filename parsing mechanism (like Kavita does) which has drawbacks since books and comics have an extremely wide variety of naming conventions and lack of good tooling.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Thanks for this. First I've heard of it. I'd prefer something more general for books (though there are comics too). I have about 22,000 titles, filenames well-constructed, that I don't have anything to serve them up remotely. I was using Nextcloud for awhile, but it's subpar.

>which has drawbacks since books and comics have an extremely wide variety of naming conventions

I actually have that part figured out. For periodicals too, like comics. The real trick with those is that it's often not that easy to find the ISSNs for them, they mostly don't list them on the inside cover.

[theshrike79]

I think Calibre, maybe combined with Calibre-web is what you're looking for.

Despite the creator having strong views on coding style and UI/UX, Calibre is still by far the best tool to manage ebooks.

[saturnite]

An even easier fit would be comic books. They already let you steam libraries of photos. I have never used that feature, but I would definitely stream some comics.

Also, they could handle audiobooks since they already stream music.

Instead, they want to sell me on streaming services when I started using Plex because I pirate my media.

I do see one issue with books that other media doesn't have. That is the ability to interact. When I use my e-reader, I like features like highlighting, taking notes, dictionaries, and other features that are more complicated that just streaming rendered images from a book.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>An even easier fit would be comic books.

That's just a book format issue, but I'm on board.

>They already let you steam libraries of photos.

Well, about that... they're kind of shit at it. Photos have always been their least favorite supported media. Not much in the way of metadata support, unable to organize them. But it brings me to another problem... they don't understand what media types are.

They support audio, but call it music. This means, just for instance, that there's a shitty icon for the library... I made a comedy album library, Plex. Steve Martin the banjo player and Steven Martin the comedian are the same human, but I don't want one album recommended as related to the other. And I don't want to see the little music note icon for the library either. Think of audio as "audio that can have many types" rather than music. It's the same with images... what if I want to have a library full of van Gogh's works? Why are you trying to mix these in with pictures of my nieces?

>Also, they could handle audiobooks since they already stream music.

But they can't, not really. Because they think all audio is music, their interface doesn't handle it... no one wants to randomize the play order of the chapters of a book. And they'd actually like to keep a bookmark of where they stopped listening. But because "all audio is music" their model is fundamentally broken.

>When I use my e-reader, I like features like highlighting, taking notes, dictionaries, and other features that are more complicated that just streaming rendered images from a book.

Well, if they implemented it correctly, it wouldn't be exactly "streaming images from a book". And they already do stuff with related media in a sophisticated fashion. If you want to see the trailers and making-ofs for a a movie, those are available right from the menu. Dictionaries or highlighting or note-taking just isn't that big of a deal. They could do it, they don't want to. They'd rather be a streaming service.

[noxvilleza]

Have you checked out Audiobookshelf? Relatively easy to self-host, can do podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks, comics. A few different clients you can use (https://abstoolbox.vito0912.de/clients has some of the more popular ones - Plappa is pretty nice).

[theshrike79]

I _SPECIFICALLY_ don't want everything apps. They just end up doing everything a bit shitty.

Plex handling anime/tv/movies is fine. I can kinda-sorta accept music too because PlexAmp is pretty good.

Audiobooks and podcasts require a very different experience. Books even more so.

Books specifically are an issue because getting a reliable metadata source for them is a pain in the ass. I know, I've built a tool for myself to grab my book reviews locally and enrich the data. There are SO MANY variants of a single book that the process ends up being manual way too often.

[Larrikin]

I disagree personally and feel there are better solutions already out there

I was furious when they removed podcasts as they are a fit for the platform and it seems like they just didn't want to maintain them anymore.