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:
I love Kavita, I just wish it had an Android app for page synchronization
Seems like you’re not reading my release notes because a mobile app is something I’m looking at building for Kavita.
Although CDisplayEx does have this out of the box if you buy it (I believe it’s a one time)
I did read the notes actually, after going back now there is 1 brief mention of it so you’ll have to excuse me for missing that. Just to reiterate, I don’t read comic books or manga so I’m not going to buy a cbr reader to read my books.
That was a joke btw about the notes as most people don’t read them and they are usually notoriously long.
Yeah, there really aren’t any book readers that support page synchronization, like at all. It could be due to not many projects existing or because epubs are quite complicated and with virtual paging, it can be very difficult to store progress back that would be beneficial to the user.
I think most users either download them or realistically save the web app to their homescreen and use the built-in reader, which is pretty good.
lmao I actually did read the notes first before I commented, funnily enough. Thanks for the reply and thank you so much for Kavita. I’m sure the mobile app is brought up constantly to you and is a source of friction. Have a great weekend!
Haha, you’d be surprised, it’s not brought up that much. It’s more about me wanting to build something that has A+ support on sync and fits within the UX I like.
Any way to get Kavita+ as a one-time payment? I really, really hate subscriptions.
Don’t have any idea on how to implement it IMHO you need to add some kind of support for e-readers like Kindle and etc. Some people read on theirs PCs but the reading experience it’s much better on readers devices.
I never read on my PC personally. The app is more aimed for using on your tablet. Kindle isn’t trivial because it doesn’t support modern js. So it’s not really feasible, hence why we allow you to setup a Kindle on your account and then send files directly to it (or other devices/email).
I really like Kavita. I started using it just a few weeks ago in an effort to expand my media library. It’s running alongside my video media library.
I love that it’s a web reader, but I’m excited for the app to come out. That would complete the experience for me as I’d rather have downloads managed by an app than have to handle the files on my local device.
Have you fix comics not working when they’re bunch of images in a folder?
Have you fix the books that just doesn’t mystérieux not import?
For the first one, there is actually a discussion about the whole loose leaf image feature:
https://github.com/Kareadita/Kavita/issues/2154Not sure without more information. Kavita has a Media tab now that will tell you when epubs don’t import (almost always due to bad internal structural metadata). A quick pass through Calibre or Sigil fixes it.
Not sure from tone of voice if you use Kavita or not, but if you do, sounds like you should voice your opinion on that discussion on the feature as I’ll be making my decision soon on it.
I have it deployed and I liked it until I imported my comics and found out it didn’t work. The other issue was annoying and I kinda gave up and stopped using Kavita for now. I’ll have a look at it again and report my issue as well. Glad to know there’s now a feature for seing non imported stuff.