Only this paragraph is required reading, the rest is me explaining at length till you puke cause I do that, sorry. So I’m looking for a self-hosted Ebook server that I can simply load the built-in web reader on any web browser, and have it remember my progress on each different browser.
*edit: a lot of responders seem to think I want each device to have its own saved spot. No. I want every time I open the book, for it to open to the last spot that I read to, even if it was on a different device. A bunch of different devices having different progress points is what I have now and it’s awful. That said, lots of good suggestions, cheers all!
Also, I have once again had it suggested to me that Audiobookshelf will save your spot in both an ebook and audio (so for instance, I could read some Discworld right now on my screen, then get in the car and put on the audiobook version and have it start from where I left off in the ebook. That would be great, but it absolutely was not my experience when I tried to do it in Audiobookshelf. Maybe they’ve fixed it I dunno.*
Reason: I often pull up books and other study materials (gear manuals, etc) on my large TV in a browser, as it is a comfortable reading experience that does not require me to use my diabetic hands with their pins and needle fingers. But one uses one’s phone when out and about, of course. Better than doomscrolling.
If I have read ahead on one device and don’t have it handy, it becomes instant hell to try to figure out where I got to without overshooting, and you end up just skimming all the pages and it’s torture, so I end up, you guessed it, doomscrolling.
I currently have Calibre Web Automated installed and it does not appear to do this, though it does have a plugin that will track you on certain Reader Devices that I do not own and whose phone app equivalents I find not good cause it’s fake e-paper on an LCD, which is just awful. I’m sure that real e-paper is awesome, but fake e-paper is just as dystopian as you might imagine.
This functionality seems like a fairly easy get, once you’ve gone to the trouble of implementing the rest of the server and doing it on those other devices, but so far I cannot find an extant project that does it. It’s very strange to me, cause of all the things that one can choose between an app or a webui, the app really cannot offer you anything that a web page cannot, in terms of your page-by-page experience. You want the text at a readable size filling the page completely, with an index swipable, that’s it.
This is my one attempt to get help finding an existing solution before I start looking at the various projects and figuring out which one I can maybe add it to. I want this ability and I don’t want another goddam device, have a server and tailscale and that’s all any User needs.
I’ve been looking for a new book server and discovered Booklore/Grimmory as well. Here is the history I can find on it as some of what people are saying is not 100% correct.
It was not vibe-coded. The original project predates genAI, so that wouldn’t have been since. I think some of the newer code might be, but the core seems unchanged.
The security issue mentioned is an API authentication bypass whereby book files were exposed if the endpoint was reachable (CVE-2025-62614). This has an 8.7 rating on severity, but realistically the end result is your books could be copied.
Licensing. This is the real skullduggery in my opinion. The maintainer had plans to switch from AGPL-3.0 to BSL. That might not be legal and it cuts out any contributors and sets the project up for monetization.
My concern with Grimmory is that it is too embedded with the flaws of Booklore. In testing it was really sluggish on mobile. I still need to do more testing, but aside from being graphically nice, it didn’t feel that stable. I was hoping to move away from Calibre-Web due to auto-importing not being supported, but in the end, I’ll likely just write something to support this on my end.