liber

Software to manage an ebook collection. It supports EPUB, MOBI and PDF formats, and it will fetch metadata and cover images on external sources (currently Google Books). It offers powerful search functionality over a HTTP interface.

Another useful feature is the ability to synchronize remote collections (currently in one direction only), making it possible for a group of people to manage a centralized ebook repository.

Installation

Binaries are available in the form of Debian packages. They will take care of installing all the necessary dependencies. If this isn't an option, you can build the software from source.

Debian packages

Add this line to your sources.list:

deb http://www.incal.net/ale/debian/liber/ .

Then make sure the GPG key used to sign the repository is installed, update the package sources, and install the liber package:

$ wget -O- http://www.incal.net/ale/debian/repo.key \
    | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install liber

Note: on Debian Wheezy, you will need to install the libleveldb1 package from the backports repository (see the Debian backports website for instructions on how to set that up) before running the commands mentioned above:

$ apt-get install -t wheezy-backports libleveldb1

Build from source

The source has a few dependencies:

• A working Go environment (note that the Go version in Debian wheezy is too old, you should install a more recent version from the Go website);
• LevelDB (and Snappy)

Some of the Go packages that liber depends upon have their own list of dependencies (Bleve in particular) which you will also need to install. On a Debian-based system, the following command should suffice:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libleveldb-dev \
    libsnappy-dev libicu-dev libstemmer-dev

You should then install Bleve, enabling some necessary features:

$ go get -u -tags 'leveldb icu libstemmer' github.com/blevesearch/bleve

And then download and install the liber source code:

$ go get -d git.autistici.org/ale/liber
$ go install git.autistici.org/ale/liber/...

This will place the resulting liber executable in $GOPATH/bin.

Usage

liber will store its database in a local directory, ~/.liber by default. Use the --db-dir option if you'd like to change this.

If you want to manage a local collection, the assumption is that you are storing all your ebooks in a single place (below a single directory, possibly organized into further subdirectories). You can control this with the (mandatory) option --book-dir.

Indexing a local ebook collection

To index a local ebook collection, run the following command:

$ liber --book-dir=/path/to/ebooks --update

The tool will attempt to identify books on Google Books. It is possible that more than one match is found, in which case liber will open a dialog box to ask you interactively to pick the right match.

You can run liber --update as many times as you like (for example whenever you add an ebook to your collection), it will automatically detect new files and files that have been removed.

Integration with Calibre

If you use Calibre to mantain your ebook collection, you can index it with liber by simply pointing its --book-dir option at the Calibre library directory. liber will read Calibre metadata files and cover images, and it will not perform remote searches for book metadata.

Searching

You can search the index from the command line, for example:

$ liber --search "Das Kapital"

This will print a list of documents that match the query. For the full query syntax, see the Bleve documentation.

Synchronizing with a remote server

To upload the contents of the local database (including the file contents themselves) to a remote liber server, run the following command:

$ liber --sync=http://remote.server.address/

Running the HTTP interface

The HTTP interface can be started with:

$ liber --http-server=:3000 --book-dir=/path/to/ebooks

This will start an HTTP server on port 3000, listening on all interfaces. The HTTP server needs some templates and static content which the Debian package installs in /usr/share/liber/htdocs.

The HTTP server will store uploaded files into the directory specified by --book-dir. You should use the same value that you passed to liber --update.