6 months ago I posted here about Kavita, an open source application that I have been working on that aims to be Plex for reading, and in these past 6 months I’ve yet again delivered so much that it warrants an update to this subreddit.
Last Post: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/139te6y/kavita_plex_for_reading_an_update/
What is Kavita?
Kavita is a fast all-in-one reading server which supports comics, manga, and books out of the box, making it easy to share your entire collection with friends and family. Kavita supports a wide range of formats (including epub and pdf), has responsive built-in readers, and offers OPDS-PS support for external reader support.
What’s new in the last 6 months:
- Automatic Collections/Reading Lists: Kavita now can build out Collections and Reading lists from ComicInfo.xml and Epub’s OPF formats. Configurable in your library settings if you want disabled.
- Kavita+: A subscription service (to support me) that expands Kavita’s ability into external metadata. Unlocks Scrobbling to AniList, External Ratings, External Reviews, Recommendations (and even recs that you don’t own).
- Personal Bookmarks: The ability to bookmark any text in an epub and quickly jump back to it. Great for cookbooks where you want to save your favorite recipies.
- Localization: Full localization support via Weblate with quite a few fully translated languages
- In Depth Metadata Filter: Completely rewrote the metadata filter to allow ANDing and ORing with a crazy number of potential fields to query against then the ability to save these as Smart Filters, which can be found to Side nav or Dashboard.
- Customization: All users can now customize their side navs and dashboard and bind Smart Filters (aka Metadata Filter query saved) to either, turn on/off any item and reorder them.
- OPDS Rework: Tons of OPDS Polish to make the experience top notch and pushing as much metadata as possible to the user in a way that works in as many apps as possible. Lots of extra flattening as well (a big critique on Kavita’s implementation)
- A ton more (just look at the release notes from here)
If you want to check it out for yourself, we have a demo available on our site:
If you’re using the demo, you’re not going to be able to do a lot of the things, because you’re not the owner of the server.
You would be able to import a cbl or create a manual reading list, but some things are admin only, like editing metadata from the UI. Would be weird if a random user on your server could grief your metadata.
There is actually a feature request for using a non-card based view for rendering out series, but not many people from the community have shown interest.
> When trying to filter, there is no option for Author or Illustrator. Can I add those, just not in the demo?
Wow, what a find. I can’t believe it was missed in 3 releases now. I’ll add those in the next release.
> Is there an option to at least remove the cover from the series summary that I am not seeing in the Demo?
No, the cover images are how nearly every server works. Although, we do have custom theme support, so you probably could easily by using a custom theme for yourself.
> Is there an option to disable the translucency/fake glass effect not present in the demo?
No option needed. You can use a custom theme and just override those variables so it can be to your liking.
> In the Book list, can we get an option in the menu to skip to reading to save the clicking and scrolling?
I didn’t fully understand what you’re asking but for the epub reader, it will save where you scrolled to and resume that when you open. If you’re seeing it different, it is likely due to people being on the demo, as a new release just came out today.