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According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.

For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app that for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflict about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.

RIP

Well, that went downhill very fast. Very sad. I liked the UI too; it was a good way to manage a collection; and it synced with my Kobo pretty easily.

I hope those who have the ability to do so will create something from its ashes.

Congrats guys! We did it!

We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.

Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. The people who scream against it on message boards and and telling other engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. We can debate about those for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though. Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not.

As far as I followed this whole ordeal, his use of ai was maybe 20% of what went wrong with this project. Open contempt for FOSS principles and his contributors, a unilateral (and probably illegal) change in license, Discord censorship, API gatekeeping and disingenuous monetization, along with a general dishonest communicationwere probably more of a nail in this coffin then the use of ai code assistance

I don’t blame the greater community for this one. Booklore was well-received. I have nothing but good wishes for all those involved. Much of the fighting about code quality and AI was among actual contributors.

There are other problems like reimplemented features after dismissing the PR, threatening to change the licence without contribution approval, and not being able to disassociate criticism of the platform as criticism of him.

The Reddit post about it a few days ago goes into it a lot more.

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word. I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing. If he is picking up his toys and going home, we still lost a developer. I wasn’t there for those issues so I don’t know how they were handled.

I’ll compare it to Lemmy. Lemmy devs are (sorry guys) I’ll say.. Disagreeable. They are headstrong and definitely have their own opinions which I have different opinions are about. I don’t think we would be friends. However, look at what they built, and the communities we’ve built thanks to their work. They started all of this, and now we have mbin and piefed and others thanks to what they started, even if don’t like how they handle things. We should always remember that the people contribute, and that’s more than the vast majority of us.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #175 for this comm, first seen 16th Mar 2026, 22:00] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Oh well guess I’ll continue using audiobookshelf.

Crazy. It had a meteoric rise.

I guess CWA is the one to use now. In a way I’m glad the space will have only a single major player.

I think CWA is the one to watch. It’s progress has been slower but steady.

Bad Bot. None of these terms are in this thread.

See my other comment in this thread, sorry it’s a lot and I’m on my phone

Good riddance.

Has anyone used Komga as an alternative? It’s primarily for manga and comics but it seems to support books too (epub and PDF). It also seems to be able to sync books with Kobo devices.

My understanding is that it wasn’t so much his “choice in tools” it was privacy concerns surrounding that choice.

No, if people use AI for organizing the shopping list they use to buy components for the server my favorite FOSS program that I’ve never contributed to or donated to, then they must be burned in effigy and cursed to the ends of the earth. I’ve never built a thing in my life, but if I did, it certainly wouldn’t be with AI.

You’re welcome.

I’ve not heard of Booklore or the critiques against it until seeing this post, but I don’t think this take is correct, in parts. And I think much of the confusion has to do with what “open source” means to you, versus that term as a formal definition (ie FOSS), versus the culture that surrounds it. In so many ways, it mirrors the term “free speech” and Popehat (Ken White) has written about how to faithfully separate the different meanings of that term.

Mirroring the same terms from that post, and in the identical spirit of pedantry in the pursuit of tractable discussion, I posit that there are 1) open source rights, 2) open source values, and 3) community decency. The first concerns those legal rights conferred from an open-source (eg ACSL) or Free And Open Source (FOSS, eg MIT or GPL) license. The details of the license and the conferred rights are the proper domain of lawyers, but the choice of which license to release with is the province of contributing developers.

The second concerns “norms” that projects adhere to, such as not contributing non-owned code (eg written on employer time and without authorization to release) or when projects self-organize a process for making community-driven changes but with a supervising BDFL (eg Python and its PEPs). These are not easy or practical to enforce, but represent a good-faith action that keeps the community or project together. These are almost always a balancing-act of competing interests, but in practice work – until they don’t.

Finally, the third is about how the user-base and contributor-base respect (or not) the project and its contributors. Should contributors be considered the end-all-be-all arbiters for the direction of the project? How much weight should a developer code-of-conduct carry? Can one developer be jettisoned to keep nine other developers onboard? This is more about social interactions than about software (ie “political”) but it cannot be fully divorced from any software made by humans. So long as humans are writing software, there will always be questions about how it is done.

So laying that foundation, I address your points.

Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing.

This definition of open-source is mixing up open-source rights (“we al have the choice to use it or not” and “anyone can write anything”) with open-source values (“for fun or seriously” and “doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful”). The statement of “open source means open” does not actually convey anything. The final sentence is an argument in the name of community decency.

To be abundantly clear, I agree that harassing someone to the point that they get up and quit, that’s a bad thing. People should not do that. But a candid discussion recognizes that there has been zero impact to open source rights, since the very possibility that “Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project” means that the project can be restarted. More clearly, open-source rights confer an irrevocable license. Even if the original author exits via stage-left, any one of us can pick up the mic and carry on. That is an open-source right, and also an open-source value: people can fork whenever they want.

How they were contributing is irrelevant

This is in the realm of community decency because other people would disagree. Plagiarism would be something that violates both the values/norms of open-source and also community decency. AI/LLMs can and do plagiarize. LLMs also produce slop (ie nonfunctioning code), and that’s also verbotten in most projects by norm (PRs would be rejected) or by community decency (PRs would be laughed out).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

I would draw the focus much more narrowly: “We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted”. Open-source rights and open-source values will persevere beyond us all, but how a community in the here-and-now governs itself is of immediate concern. There are hard questions, just like all community decency questions, but apart from Booklore happening to be open-source, this is not specific at all to FOSS projects.

To that end, I close with the following: build the communities you want to see. No amount of people-pleasing will unify all, so do what you can to bring together a coalition of like-minded people. Find allies that will bat for you, and that you would bat for. Reject those who will not extend to you the same courtesy. Software devs find for themselves new communities all the time through that wonderful Internet thing, but they are not without agency to change the course of history, simply by carefully choosing whom they will invest in a community with. Never apologize for having high standards. Go forth and find your place in this world.

i started using CWA and it has been fantastic. it was the best project for my purposes among the ones i tried (calibre-web, kavita, booklore). Booklore was pretty but not really stable imo

I’m on my phone now so I can’t respond to everything. I wanted to say I do disagree, but I appreciate you taking the time to write it out and I understand your point of view.

While I understand the underlying guidelines we try to uphold, I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes, and it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to. If that’s your personal belief, I’m all for it, but this guy might have just decided to make a project without caring about the exact definitions of OSS. that’s a risk we take using OSS code is that the maintainer can change their minds, but we can also take it and do what we please with it.

Anyway, I’d have more but thumbs are stupid. Thank you for your thoughtful reply

I share some of your same views. It would be good if devs using AI would state that on their github or codeberg, etc. However, the immediate, kneejerk, backlash probably snuffs that disclosure. Just look ar the reactions to AI here at Lemmy Selfhosted. AI is a tool. As much as I chafe against regulation, it’s a tool that needs some heavy governmental regulation imho, but a tool nonetheless. It’s not going away. I’d say there will come a day when we use AI without even knowing it. It will be seamless.

Unfortunately, right now we are stuck in the novelty phase of AI rice cookers and pretty pictures. I think with some regulation, and more fine tuning, it could become a great dev assistant, and has some very real world use cases. I can understand why people don’t want a 100% AI coded piece of software where the dev really has no idea what they are doing as far as security. I don’t either. That’s an obvious. You’ve got to understand and be able to interpret and understand the results of an AI query. However, if the dev is competent and uses AI as an assistant, I don’t see the conundrum.

I also think there are young devs who are excited about contributing to opensource and the selfhosting community. They have the fire, just not the experience. Experience is something you don’t have until after you need it.

I liked the UI too

It looked like a very solid UI. In fact, so much so that I’ve toyed with the idea of deploying it.

it works well for manga in my limited experience, spin up an instance and try it out :)

I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.

Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.

Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.

Long live BookLore!

You may need to go catch up on this. The “dev” in this case caused more issues than they solved.

One can’t be missed if one didn’t contribute to anything in the first place.

I still say even if the guy is an asshole, we still lost someone who was contributing.

I use tt-rss. Tho I’ve never interacted with the dev personally, from what I can tell, he is kind of a hard headed, asshole. Still a great piece of software tho. Him being an alleged asshole doesn’t deter me.

Yep, I saw the writing on the wall and tagged my 1.13.2 image locally. It’s still running fine on my machine and I added his animated donate button to my filter lists on ublock. I’m going to have to backup this image and keep using it until it breaks. Hopefully by then someone has a fork.

Who are we missing, Claude?

Congrats guys! We did it!

Thanks for joining in!

Seriously, enough was going on with the project that the AI was just the final nail (or the deepest nail) in the coffin. What’s important is that we denounce AI where we see it, as this (and not “usage”) is the only non-violent way we have to try and lead a change in how AI is developed and deployed in the first place. The problem is not simply “someone can use AI in their spare time”, it’s what even has to happen as a prerequisite for that to even be a thing in the first place (code theft, mass license violation, environmental destruction, RAM shortages, erosion of civil and digital rights, exemptions for big corpo, you name it).

We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

Open Source means the source is open, not that you can do whatever ass-unethical thing you want. That weird impression of the world is something that techbros, cryptobros and liberals are trying to push. Don’t be fooled. We defended ourselves, and we managed a tie.

It seems to me that having an asshole that contributes is a shitty situation, but each to their own.

(hehe poo joke but the point stands)

I will say, even given all the drama around the original creator in the last few weeks, Booklore has a solid front end experience, is quite flexible, and generally stable app. It’s a bummer the creator acted childishly (again and again), but I know I’ll be looking to use whatever the v2 of this becomes.

I just switched to Komga, the only thing I’m missing is the easy way to search for metadata, but I don’t mind that part. Komga works perfectly fine for normal books in my short testing.

The handling of books is a bit weird, because for single books it creates a “Series” with only one entry.

I don’t directly sync to my Kobo reader, but instead use KOReader and access Komga via OPDS. The progress sync from KOReader to Komga works too (just don’t use special characters in your password)

You’re exactly right.

I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.

I don’t think they can be force applied to everyone who contributes

This is certainly an opinion, but here is a list of major projects that have a code of conduct: https://opensourceconduct.com/projects . How well those projects enforce their CoCs, idk. But they are applied, otherwise they wouldn’t bother writing out a CoC.

it’s not fair to hold people to standards they didn’t personally agree to

Software development is not the only place which holds people to standards. The realm of criminal and civil law, education, and business all hold people to standards, whether those people like it or not. In fact, it’s hard to think of any realm that allows opt-out for standards, barring the incel-ridden corners of the web.

this guy might have just decided to make a project

Starting any project – as in, inviting other people to join in – is distinct from just publishing a public Git repo. I too can just post my random pet projects to Codeberg, but that does not mean I will necessarily accept PRs or bug reports, let alone even responding to those. But to actually announce something, that where the project begins. And to do so recklessly does reflect poorly upon the maintainer.

The same people celebrating this are the same people that whine about how nobody wants to make OSS anymore. :slopper:

even if I have, I wouldn’t bother helping you out.

Shame, it was a great project. Guess I’ll be migrating to calibre-web automated.

Wasn’t the vim maintainer similar dismissive of the community for like a decade before neovim forked and rewrite the entire plugin layer and async layer?

Even with problems things could have improved.

It would if he was dumping huge portions of AI generated code into it the repository faster than people could reasonably review it.

So, completely uneducated about the real issues that led to this, you decided this was a good opportunity for your pro AI soap box.

Yeah, there’s definitely a reason we can’t have reasonable coverslip conversations around AI.

I set up Komga as soon as the original reddit thread went up about the Booklore dev. Works great, pretty simple, does what it needs to do, and setting up Kobo sync for my wife took all of 5 minutes.

Kind of skipped over my entire thesis there didn’t you? And my other comments addressing those.

Yep, works great. If you need help setting it up, reach out.

I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.

Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.

You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.

The risks of auto-updating now include “devs losing their shit” which has become increasingly common.

I’ve tried CWA in the past but, for some reason (probably my own fault!), I could never get the Kobo Sync function to work. Maybe I’ll give it another go.

As a stopgap for now, I have all my ebooks in Audiobookshelf. There’s no sync function, but I’m used to the UI because I already use and like it for audiobooks and podcasts.

FYI, the original developer of tt-rss stopped maintaining it last year, and a fork has taken its place: https://github.com/tt-rss/tt-rss#some-notes-about-this-project.

This is a bad take. AI is an attack on open source, and so no, open source communities shouldn’t be welcoming of that kind of attack. It’s a bit like the Paradox of Tolerance… you cannot tolerate intolerance, or else your whole community falls apart.

The other way I tend to think of it is ad volunteering st your local library. You can stop whenever you want, you don’t owe anyone more of your time. But what you can’t do is start showing up and shredding books during your shift. Especially for a project dedicated to managing books, using AI is a whole and entire betrayal, and isn’t something that can be brushed away with “AI is just a tool.”

If youre talkong about local models youre not really talking about what everyone else is, and youre already avoiding the wave

Total non sequitur

You don’t really need to care about that from a consumer perspective. Unfortunately however, this is a common weakness of FOSS projects. If the maintainer is an asshole, the project suffers and eventually dies most of the time. Being an asshole is not conducive towards attracting contributors. Who knew?

I saw your thesis about how the community needs to not drive off maintainers. But that’s not what happened here. There was a dispute between maintainers over the integrity of the code being dumped into the repo by one Dev. It wasn’t some kneejerk reaction to AI, it was the people who help develop the project themselves worried about the longevity and maintenance when huge amounts of slop code are being pulled in faster than it can be checked. If your had any idea the real problems that open source maintainers are dealing with around AI slop right now you might had had the sense to not get on your soapbox about the wrong issue.

But they are in this thread, someone directly mentioned Git, both HTTP and HTTPS are mentioned directly in links description, and finally SSL is mentioned by the bot itself when explaining HTTPS.

I don’t see the pitchfork mob making that distinction. (And I think you are severely underestimating the capability of, say, the qwen-3.5 models locally hosted with a good CLI agent like Mistral Vibe.)

The only lesson to be learned from this is disclosure. If AI is so good/bad don’t hide the fact that you are using it. End of story. Let people make their decisions based off that.

They seem to be working on uh, syncing all the sync features. There have been some updates recently.

Yeah I saw a blurb about that a couple months ago. Will have to investigate. Thanks for the heads up tho

Oh goddamn it, I deployed this like five days ago. Been working on digitizing my whole collection for the past week cuz I liked it so much. Fuck lol.

Uh, anyone know any good alternatives???

I think there may be some misunderstanding on what constitutes “the community” and what “force applied” mean in this context.

In any self-governing body, there are written and unwritten rules of conduct. Nobody has any power or ability to force anyone to stay and participate in the community at all, so they literally have no power to force anyone to do anything. The only power they do have is conditional, and boils down to, “Anyone that wants to participate in this project must conduct themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate.”

If there is a rift, and there is not consensus on what those guidelines should or should not contain, the smaller or less contributing group is no longer “conducting themselves and their work by the guidelines we dictate”, so their contributions are no longer accepted. The out group has not been forced to do anything at all, and is free to copy the project at the point of contention and take it in the direction of their own vision, setting up their own code of conduct and submission rules.

This is an appeal to the masses. There is not yet any consensus amongst anyone who has scientifically compiled data that AI use in nearly any application has yielded productivity gains, while ill effects of its use are widely documented with more being discovered often.

I am not saying that there are no productive applications for AI, but I am saying that of the currently millions of attempted applications for it, maybe a couple dozen will prove effective and truly have a positive cost-benefit ratio.

“9 out of 10 doctors recommend Camel cigarettes.”

Sonlook up the other issues besides AI.

https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita maybe?

Son look up all of the other comments that said that and also where I responded to it already.

On my server I have Calibre Web Automated, Komga, and Kavita setup. I started with CWA for epubs and it’s been pretty great especially for syncing metadata that, with the recent update, has gotten better. The downside I’ve had is with comics. It supports them but there’s currently no support for writing metadata for .cbr or .cbz so trying to sync or update metadata errors out. Sometimes it saves it, but a lot of the time it errors out for me. Which is why I spun up Komga and Kavita. They’re both good for comics, manga, and books. Plus the UI on both is nice. However, they both don’t sync metadata as well as CWA. I think there’s another container you can create to write metadata for Komga and Kavita, but I had no luck with it. Eventually I’ll decide on just one, but so far, I’m undecided on which one I like the most.

The bot commented when the thread was young. HTTP, HTTPS and SSL were nowhere in the thread. I used ctl+F to make sure HTTP was nowhere in the thread before commenting. Later someone mentioned Git and the bot added Git. Even later, I added the announcement and link.

Even it had found links, finding a link and defining HTTPS, HTTP, and SSL is not helpful.

you were right btw

Have you read the post? Just wait for the new repo

Even it had found links, finding a link and defining HTTPS, HTTP, and SSL is not helpful.

Maybe the comment wasn’t synchronized with your instance yet, and I’m not sure if the bot identified a link like this or a link like https://google.com/, where in the markdown description they added the HTTPS explicitly.

And I don’t know if the bot suffers from the Scunthorpe problem, i.e. dumb bot.

What’s the work flow life for CWA? I currently use calibre-web (kobosync) and calibre to organize and polish then drag and drop the epubs to calibre-web. There has to be a better way lol

@minoche Just a few weeks ago, I was looking for an app to selfhost my ebook collection. Booklore was on the short list.

Now I'm glad to have found out that my already existing Audiobookshelf installation can handle ebooks as well.

I’ve been using Calibre (not the web version tho) to fetch metadata and better covers and create .opf files before I upload to my server anyway. Kavita’s documentation says it will import metadata from an opf in the same folder, so it should work out of the box, yes?

Honestly Calibre has a LOT of features that I don’t ever use, which is why I wasn’t planning on running CWA. I don’t have any comics, but between Komga and Kavita, which would you say is better for books (most of mine are epub format)?

Yes, friend, I read the post. But frankly I don’t like keeping all my eggs in one basket, particularly considering how shit went down with Booklore.

I joined the new discord, and will make a donation once there’s a means to do so, but I’m not sure how long it will take them to get something up and running. The original dev also joined their discord and immediately started talking shit to everyone in there, so that was interesting. And the mods there also asked for logo ideas, and it pretty quickly devolved into an AI slop fest, which was disappointing. So. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word

You got lost in the sauce because your critical thinking skills are already eroding. The LLM brainlet effect is real, the neurodegeneration has already set in.

So what you didn’t want to read the rest of that and just jumped to insulting me?

First off, I started self hosting about a year or so ago so I’m not an expert. However, I decided to migrate a couple of my books from CWA to both Komga and Kavita so I could compare and reply to you. That led me down a rabbit hole of error messages and I was ready to tell you to just use CWA. But it was user error due to corrupted files lol. After getting that sorted, I’ve come to the conclution that Komga and Kavita are nearly identical. The only difference I could see is, IMO, Kavita is prettier. But they both manage their files roughly the same and if you have the metadata in a .opf inside the same folder as the epub both will pull the metadata with no additional config needed. TBH, Kavita looks better to me. However, Komga has a better web reader IMO. Sometimes with Kavitas web reader I have to change the view settings to scroll rather than columns because it bugs and doesn’t continue to the next page. Whereas I haven’t had that issue with Komga. If you just want a virtural library to download your books off of, then I would recommend Kavita because of it’s UI. However, if you’re planning on mostly using the web reader, I would recommend Komga. Hopefully that was helpful.

Ironically, you’re proving my point in asking this question.

I’ve never used Calibre-web so I wouldn’t know the difference but Calibre Web Automated is supposed to be a blend of Calibre and Calibre-Web. I don’t run a calibre server at home anymore because it wasn’t needed after implementing CWA. I did have to copy some Calibre files to run the CWA container (it’s in the setup doc) but I haven’t needed Calibre since setting up CWA. Whenever I get more books I move the files to the “booksync” folder and it uploads it to CWA. You can also upload them via the webpage. The downside, I usually have to manually fetch the metadata for the books. But that’s not a big deal to me. At least I can do everything in one place. I think CWA supports CW plugins, but I’m not 100% certain. I would recommend it if you’re looking for one place to hold and update your books metadata.

That’s fair. An unfortunate situation.

Thank you for answering.