Episode: 2209
Title: HPR2209: Calibre eBook Server
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2209/hpr2209.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:44:59

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This is HPR Episode 2209 entitled Calibri Book Server.
It is hosted by John Kulp and is about 13 minutes long and Karimaklin flag.
The summer is a quick run now not how to share your ebook library on your network using Calibri Server.
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Hey everybody this is John Kulp and Lafayette Louisiana with another recording for Hacker Public Radio.
This one today is one that I've wanted to do for quite a long time.
It must have been on my to-do list for the last six months or so.
And it's another one having to do with ebooks.
And this one specifically is how to share your ebook collection on the network either your local network or if you've got a server setup that way you can share it to a publicly, you know, an outward facing community using either an IP address or your domain name and access your ebook library from wherever you are on any device.
I use Calibri for this. Calibri, you may have used to manage your ebook collection. I use it for mine.
And I also, you may remember from earlier episodes that I've done about ebooks.
I use it to perform conversions to do all kinds of stuff.
It's a great, great application.
I'll have a link to where you can download Calibri or you can just install it from the repository if you're on a Linux distribution.
I've got more than 900 books in my ebook collection and I often like to share them either with other people in my family or have them appear on other devices besides my Kindle.
Now, when you purchase ebooks from the Kindle store or from the Nook store or other places like that, normally they will have DRM on them.
When I import them to my Calibri library that DRM is stripped off using a plugin that you can find.
I'm not going to talk about how to do that on here, but you do even a cursory search of the internet for stripping DRM and Calibri.
That's C-A-L-I-B-R-E and you will find out how to install the plugin that will take care of this.
And what that allows you to do is to convert your ebooks to different formats to be accommodated on different devices.
So the format for my Kindle paper white is AZW3, but the format that I use on my phone, which is an Android phone, is EPUB.
And without stripping off the DRM, you can't convert it from one format to another.
So it's something that happens as soon as I import things into my library, the DRM is gone and I don't even think about it anymore.
I just will do the conversions I need, edit the books if necessary, either for correcting typos or for changing the formatting to suit my own tastes.
If you know a little bit of HTML and CSS, you can do all kinds of stuff to make the ebooks look the way you want.
Anyway, this episode is not about conversion and formatting and stuff like that, but rather how to share your books using the Calibri server.
If you open up the Calibri desktop application, you can see there are buttons all along the top of the interface.
And one of those buttons is connect slash share.
If you click on that button, you'll see a couple of options.
Actually, I see four options, connect a folder, start content server, start wireless device connection, and set up email-based sharing of books.
The only one of these I use and the one we're talking about today is start content server.
If you click on that, it will take the collection of books that you have in your library and make them available on the network.
So I've just done that on my laptop right now and so the books that I have in my collection on my laptop are now being served up at a local internal IP address, 192.168.soforth.
And it's done through port 8080.
And I assume if you go somewhere in configuration, you can probably change the port number and stuff like that.
Now, the disadvantage to doing it straight from your desktop application, especially if you're on a laptop that you close the lid and the collection goes away, is that the desktop applications normally are started and stopped with some frequency.
And so you can't rely on it always being open and ready for you to grab your books.
So you can use the command line tools in caliber on your server to start just a caliber ebook library, Damon, and just have it running all the time.
And so that's what I've done with the server I have over there, which is actually I turned it off for the few minutes that I'm going to be recording this because it was making noise.
So all you have to do is install caliber on your server and then you need to put your ebook library over there.
So what I do is I just use a secure copy command or an arsink command, I can't remember which I think it's an arsink command to copy my entire library that's on my laptop over to my server.
And that way it's always synced up with my collection.
And so then either I or my wife or the kids or whoever can get on their Kindles and use, there's a little application on the Kindle, at least on newer versions of it called Experimental Browser.
And if you open up the Experimental Browser and then type in the address of the served up content, you can access in there, tap the button to download the book and it will add it to your device's library.
Let me see, I have, I'm going to have an example start up script in the show notes.
And if you're interested in running caliber server on your own web server, then you should take a look at the start up script that I have and plug in the values that will suit your setup accordingly.
So things like the caliber library path where you just put in the path to your caliber directory.
There's a PID file, so the process ID file that tells it what file to use for the process ID.
The user name is the user that the Damon is running as and then two options that I use are the, I actually have mine outward facing.
And so since a lot of this stuff is protected by copyright, I have it password protected.
And so I have a user name and a password that you have to use if you're going to log in and access any of the books.
And then I also specify a port number on the start up script example. I put just port number three, four, five, six, not the one I use, but you can do whatever you want with yours.
And so you plug in the values that you want for all of those things and then you can see more command line options for start up if you go to the manual, the user manual for it.
And I put a link for that in the show notes as well.
You have to put the script in your slash Etsy slash init dot D directory with all of the other start up scripts. And then you can use the service command to start it up on Debian anyway.
I'm not sure what it'll be on other systems, so it'd be service space, caliber, hyphen, server, space, and then whatever action you want to do, start, stop, restart, and so forth.
So once you have this going, it's great. I mean, you've got your entire ebook library available online to put it on different devices and share it with your family and that kind of thing.
One little gotcha about updating the library. So I've got 900 and some books and I didn't always have that many.
And so each time I add some more books to my library, there's a there's a little process you have to go through to update the caliber library on the server.
I noticed when I just did ran my arsink command again to push everything over to the server that I did not see the new books when I next went into the server interface from a different device.
I would only see the old books. And so I figured out pretty soon that what the reason this is happening is that there is a metadata file that is it cannot be updated unless the service is not running.
And so the first thing I do is SSH into the server and stop the caliber server Damon. And then I can do the arsink command to push everything in the caliber directory over to the server.
And then I restart the Damon on the server and then all the new books appear in there.
I have a few links here in the show notes. One is to caliber, another is to the user manual for the command line server.
And another is to the Marvin ebook app for iOS. I put that there because I use that with some frequency on the iPad that I have that belongs to the school.
And Marvin has a way like a different sources that you can set up in there to get your ebooks. And so I just include my own caliber server as one of my ebook source options there.
And then I put a link also to FB reader, the wonderful open source multi-platform ebook reader.
And that's what I like to use on my phone if I'm reading things on that. Normally I don't read books on my phone. I just do that in a pinch.
If I find myself in a situation where I'm bored and I've got nothing but my phone, I always want to have access to an ebook.
And so I use FB reader for that. Otherwise I always want to use my Kindle Paper White because it is an excellent reading experience.
Alright, I think that's probably about all I need to say about that. It's a pretty easy server to set up. It just works.
And I like it very much. I use it all the time. My wife uses it and my kids don't so much. But the wife and I use the shared ebook server all the time to share books back and forth.
Alright, I guess that's it. I think I'm going to call it quits for now and I'll record another episode about something else here in a couple of days.
Okay, talk to you all later. Bye.
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