Up to just recently I had my eBooks in a folder on my Synology NAS without any particular sorting. In order to read a book, I had to find it in this folder, download it to my device(s) and then open it with an eBook reader.
My favorite reader is Moon+ Reader. It’s fast, had a clean interface, and all the functionalities I need (some of them in the Pro version which is only a few bucks). Moon+ Reader allows to sync reading positions to WebDAV. I use this to flawlessly read the same book on multiple devices, in particular my phone and my tablet.
The drawbacks of this system were
- No possibility to search for books based on categories etc.
- Bookmarks and highlighting in Moon+ Reader are linked to the filename. So, when I renamed an eBook in my Library and downloaded it again, the previous bookmarks/highlighting was not linked to the book anymore
Therefore, I was looking for a more efficient way to manage my eBooks. Here’s what I did in the end:
- I installed Calibre on my PC. Calibre uses a library to manage ebooks and saves all books alongside the library. My Calibre library is on my Synology NAS.
- I imported my ebooks to Calibre.
- I installed Calibre-Web as Docker container on my Synology NAS and pointed it to the Calibre library folder
- I created a new “Net Library” in Moon+ Reader which connects to Calibre-Web (add “/OPDS” to the Calibre-Web address.
And that’s it! I now have an actual ebook library with powerful search possibilities and filenames remain the same (allowing to keep track of bookmarks and highlighting on multiple devices linked to the same book).