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:
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Please make permalinks to pages! The builtin pdf.js in firefox can also do #page1 #page999 it would be cool if you could also highlight text light that…
I fricking hate calibre as a service, gonna give kavita a try
UI still needs a lot of work.
- All Series or your library view
- Kavita doesn’t support adding via the UI nor likely will. But you can add it to the underlying storage and either use the API to trigger a scan, the UI, or just let the folder watcher do it’s thing and scan it in for you.
- Into a reading list? Usually I bulk select items and use the context menu to add to a reading list, but I think CBL import is much more flexible and easy for big reading orders.
- You can remove them via internal metadata or just remove them from the UI. Not sure if you’re asking for something else.
- The pencil item
- On Deck is in progress or recently released chapters of a series you might have finished but new stuff was released. You can remove it via Customize Dashboard.
- See above.
- You can’t remove Home
- I’m not sure why you would. No program to my knowledge has no cover art.
I would highly recommend you visit our Wiki to learn about how to use Kavita. A lot of your questions indicate that you haven’t played around much with it.
I am using the Demo by the way. So maybe the Demo needs to be updated? I am not seeing a lot of what you are talking about.
- Neither of those options work. Certain things get grouped. Like the Amazing-Man Comics. That is grouped. That doesn’t show the different books in the series. A cool idea would be options for different groupings and to disable it entirely.
- Boo.
- No, I mean the view. I hate icon view. I would like lists view like when you get to the list of books in a series.
- I don’t see this option in the Demo.
- I don’t see this option in the Demo.
- I don’t see this option in the Demo.
- I don’t see this option in the Demo.
- Boo.
- I guess this more the hate I have for icon view.
Also, different issues.
- When trying to filter, there is no option for Author or Illustrator. Can I add those, just not in the demo?
- Is there an option to at least remove the cover from the series summary that I am not seeing in the Demo?
- Is there an option to disable the translucency/fake glass effect not present in the demo?
- In the Book list, can we get an option in the menu to skip to reading to save the clicking and scrolling?
If you’re using the demo, you’re not going to be able to do a lot of the things, because you’re not the owner of the server.
You would be able to import a cbl or create a manual reading list, but some things are admin only, like editing metadata from the UI. Would be weird if a random user on your server could grief your metadata.
There is actually a feature request for using a non-card based view for rendering out series, but not many people from the community have shown interest.
> When trying to filter, there is no option for Author or Illustrator. Can I add those, just not in the demo?
Wow, what a find. I can’t believe it was missed in 3 releases now. I’ll add those in the next release.
> Is there an option to at least remove the cover from the series summary that I am not seeing in the Demo?
No, the cover images are how nearly every server works. Although, we do have custom theme support, so you probably could easily by using a custom theme for yourself.
> Is there an option to disable the translucency/fake glass effect not present in the demo?
No option needed. You can use a custom theme and just override those variables so it can be to your liking.
> In the Book list, can we get an option in the menu to skip to reading to save the clicking and scrolling?
I didn’t fully understand what you’re asking but for the epub reader, it will save where you scrolled to and resume that when you open. If you’re seeing it different, it is likely due to people being on the demo, as a new release just came out today.
I’ve been really enjoying Kavita. It’s the best reader I’ve used.
I did have to get on top of standardizing the metadata of my epub collection though because Kavita seems to really rely on that for sorting stuff.
f there’s a method to edit the Metadata of the epub and write it back to the file that I haven’t found that would be great.
I got you. We have a wiki article just for this thing:
https://wiki.kavitareader.com/en/guides/misc/calibreI guess that’s the point. That’s absolutely the only thing i run calibre for. I would like to not have to.
Using readarr (with goodreads bookshelf) connected to calibre-web. Then was using calibre but friends hated the UI for reading (granted calibre has kobo integration). So using Kavita and its awesome for downloading and reading in browser.
Highly recommend for anyone who uses their browser to read. Super clean UI
What is this goodreads bookshelf in Readarr?
Its a list. So it can sync in a users shelf. I use it like a request tool
I love Kavita, I just wish it had an Android app for page synchronization
Seems like you’re not reading my release notes because a mobile app is something I’m looking at building for Kavita.
Although CDisplayEx does have this out of the box if you buy it (I believe it’s a one time)
I did read the notes actually, after going back now there is 1 brief mention of it so you’ll have to excuse me for missing that. Just to reiterate, I don’t read comic books or manga so I’m not going to buy a cbr reader to read my books.
That was a joke btw about the notes as most people don’t read them and they are usually notoriously long.
Yeah, there really aren’t any book readers that support page synchronization, like at all. It could be due to not many projects existing or because epubs are quite complicated and with virtual paging, it can be very difficult to store progress back that would be beneficial to the user.
I think most users either download them or realistically save the web app to their homescreen and use the built-in reader, which is pretty good.
lmao I actually did read the notes first before I commented, funnily enough. Thanks for the reply and thank you so much for Kavita. I’m sure the mobile app is brought up constantly to you and is a source of friction. Have a great weekend!
Moon+ reader supports it, I can sync from my phone to tablet. It uses Google drive to handle it.
Good job. I installed it this week and no problems so far 👍 It suits my needs perfectly for now.
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.
Is the flattening what causes chapter 0 of a volume to sync as the full volume to Tachiyomi which then reports back the entire volume as read to Kavita? (if Kavita is enabled as progress tracker)
No. Tachiyomi uses the API directly, but has some hacks in the code, because of Tachiyomi’s architecture. Chapter 0 of a volume means the whole volume is represented in that one file. So if you read it in Tachiyomi, then you’d expect the whole volume to be read in Kavita.
Flattening is where if you have just loose leaf chapters and no volume, Kavita would originally serve as the DB ordered it, so you’d have to click through a pointless Volume 0. Now, everything is put in one and minimized as much as possible to get you to your media as quick as possible.
Ah okay, thank you for explaining! :) still think 0 numbered chapters would need to be handled differently, really threw me off big time when I encountered this problem.
If it’s a Tachiyomi problem, chapter 0 of K-On! on Mangadex works as expected?
Yeah I’m not sure since I don’t use tachiyomi, but when things don’t work as expected, I would encourage you to raise a ticket. That way the dev (of the tachiyomi plugin) can investigate.
Have you fix comics not working when they’re bunch of images in a folder?
Have you fix the books that just doesn’t mystérieux not import?
For the first one, there is actually a discussion about the whole loose leaf image feature:
https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita/issues/2154Not sure without more information. Kavita has a Media tab now that will tell you when epubs don’t import (almost always due to bad internal structural metadata). A quick pass through Calibre or Sigil fixes it.
Not sure from tone of voice if you use Kavita or not, but if you do, sounds like you should voice your opinion on that discussion on the feature as I’ll be making my decision soon on it.
Don’t have any idea on how to implement it IMHO you need to add some kind of support for e-readers like Kindle and etc. Some people read on theirs PCs but the reading experience it’s much better on readers devices.
What you are making honestly has no use to me, but I have been following none the less. It is an interesting bit of kit. Keep up the effort, it is not terrible to use for the bit I have used it. As others said of course though, a phone app would be the king. Sadly you also can’t benefit those users of other tablets for reading like Kindle. Using the email service is so hacky and just not great from a user experience.
Yeah, those kindle-like devices really suck in that there is no way to load a modern website on them, you have to maintain a non-modern javascript app. It’s just a ton of maintenance and extra testing that I’d have to do to support them. I haven’t found the email service to be that bad, but agree, the extra step is annoying.
Phone app is coming for sure. It’s always been in my vision for the software because I got to have a better Sync support than Plex. I’ve been hinting at it in my past 4 release notes, basically this 0.7.x are all massive foundational changes that are required before I can even think about starting on mobile development.
Any way to get Kavita+ as a one-time payment? I really, really hate subscriptions.