r/ePub

After years of reading on multiple devices (Kobo, Linux laptop, phone) and struggling to keep my reading position in sync, I decided to build my own solution.

VarBook is a self-hosted web app that lets you:

• Upload EPUBs (drag & drop or via a Calibre plugin for batch uploads)
• Read in the browser with a built-in epub.js reader (PWA, works offline)
• Serve your library via OPDS to any compatible reading app
• Sync reading positions between the web reader and KOReader on Kobo e-readers

The trickiest part was syncing positions between epub.js (which uses CFI, an XPath-like pointer into the HTML DOM) and KOReader (which uses its own page-based engine with xpointers). I ended up using chapter + percentage within chapter as a common ground. Not pixel-perfect, but way better than tapping "next page" 70 times to catch up.

The app also tracks reading stats (time, sessions, progress) and supports multiple users.

• Public instance (open registration): https://varbook.hophop.be
• GitHub: https://github.com/ndieschburg/varbook
• Full write-up: https://trucs.hophop.be/en/blog/varbook-bibliotheque-epub-self-hosted

Open source, trilingual (EN/FR/ES), feedback welcome!

I've been using a number of sources to download stories from the web and convert them into epubs for reading offline on my phone and have amassed a sizeable library that has a number of near duplicates ...

what I mean by near duplicates is one of the stories I read has hit nearly 2000 chapters and releases multiple new chapters a week so I've got multiple copies with different sections of the story often overlapping and I wonder if there's a program that can search my epubs for such near duplicates so I can get rid of the extras or possibly merge them (because yeah I don't redownload the whole story every time I often set it to just download the last 10 or 20 chapters often leaving a few chapters of overlap with previous downloads)

I decided to go reread a fanfic that I downloaded that is no longer available but for some reason, I couldn’t access it. I tried accessing the other epubs I had on my books app but I can’t get into them either. I can only access the ones I downloaded more recently, but the older stuff I can’t get into. Can someone tell me why this happened and how to fix it?