Turn Raspberry Pi into an Ebook Server with Calibre

Productivity Sauce

There is probably no better tool for managing, converting, and sharing ebooks than Calibre. You can use it as a regular desktop application for reading and organizing ebooks, but Calibre also features a built-in server for sharing ebooks on the web. In practical terms, this means that you can publish your ebook library on the web and access all your ebooks from any machine using a browser. To publish your ebook library, you can turn Raspberry Pi into a little headless Calibre server. And since a fairly recent version of Calibre is available in the Raspbian software repository, this project can be done in a few simple steps.

Because Calibre doesn't allow you to create libraries and populate them with ebooks from the command line, you need to do this using Calibre on your regular machine. Copy then the library to your Raspberry Pi (e.g., ~/pi/calibre). Next, install Calibre on Raspberry Pi using the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install calibre

Run then the calibre-server command followed by the path to the Calibre library:

calibre-server --with-library=/home/pi/calibre

Once the server is up and running, you can access the published library by pointing a browser to http://myrpi:8080 (replace myrpi with the actual IP address or domain name of your Raspberry Pi server). The calibre-server command supports several options. To restrict access to the published library, you can protect it with a password using the --password option, and to run the Calibre server in the background as a daemon, use the --daemonize option. Refer to the Calibre documentation for a list of supported options and their descriptions.

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