6 months ago I posted here about Kavita, an open source application that I have been working on that aims to be Plex for reading, and in these past 6 months I've yet again delivered so much that it warrants an update to this subreddit.
Last Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/139te6y/kavita_plex_for_reading_an_update/
What is Kavita?
Kavita is a fast all-in-one reading server which supports comics, manga, and books out of the box, making it easy to share your entire collection with friends and family. Kavita supports a wide range of formats (including epub and pdf), has responsive built-in readers, and offers OPDS-PS support for external reader support.
What's new in the last 6 months:
- Automatic Collections/Reading Lists: Kavita now can build out Collections and Reading lists from ComicInfo.xml and Epub's OPF formats. Configurable in your library settings if you want disabled.
- Kavita+: A subscription service (to support me) that expands Kavita's ability into external metadata. Unlocks Scrobbling to AniList, External Ratings, External Reviews, Recommendations (and even recs that you don't own).
- Personal Bookmarks: The ability to bookmark any text in an epub and quickly jump back to it. Great for cookbooks where you want to save your favorite recipies.
- Localization: Full localization support via Weblate with quite a few fully translated languages
- In Depth Metadata Filter: Completely rewrote the metadata filter to allow ANDing and ORing with a crazy number of potential fields to query against then the ability to save these as Smart Filters, which can be found to Side nav or Dashboard.
- Customization: All users can now customize their side navs and dashboard and bind Smart Filters (aka Metadata Filter query saved) to either, turn on/off any item and reorder them.
- OPDS Rework: Tons of OPDS Polish to make the experience top notch and pushing as much metadata as possible to the user in a way that works in as many apps as possible. Lots of extra flattening as well (a big critique on Kavita's implementation)
- A ton more (just look at the release notes from here)
If you want to check it out for yourself, we have a demo available on our site:
I really like Kavita. I started using it just a few weeks ago in an effort to expand my media library. It's running alongside my video media library.
I love that it's a web reader, but I'm excited for the app to come out. That would complete the experience for me as I'd rather have downloads managed by an app than have to handle the files on my local device.
For the time being, Tachiyomi provides an ample experience.
Obviously, a native dedicated app would integrate a lot more tightly, but you might want to give it a try. It can be set to auto-download and auto-delete based on some rules you can alter to some extent. (but it can work manually as well)