I added BookLore to my homelab

Happy 2026!

Update: In March 2026, there was drama around BookLore and eventually the developer either deleted or privated the repository and all accompanied materials. There's now a fork called Grimmory that is aiming to continue on the footsteps. I haven't looked into it yet so can't vouch for it yet but if you wonder why the links below take you nowhere, check out Grimmory instead.

First of my holiday projects was to set up BookLore to my homelab to manage my e-books. It’s a pretty nice full system that allows you to manage your collection but also provides an interface to read the books and an OPDS server that can be used for example with KOReader to sync your reading progress across different systems.

I don’t yet use KOReader on any of my devices and I don’t intend to read my books in browser so at this point, it’s mainly to gather all my e-books from various sources like my NAS, iPad, Kindle and laptops to a single location.

For example, I recently purchased Martha Wells’ Murderbot series from Humble Bundle and I’m planning to read through them next year, maybe taking a head start already during the holidays. BookLore allows me to easily check what book’s coming next, keep track of my notes and reviews and so on, even if I still manually download the books to my devices for reading.

I’m willing to be that some time next year, having access to this system will motivate me to maybe get a Kobo reader to make it easier to read from my own collection.

The best part of BookLore is that it’s running in my bedroom so I own my data and it’s open source so I can add things to it if I find a need for something it doesn’t provide out of the box.