New to WIP?
We're a group of makers shipping together. We help each other stay accountable and reach our goals.
Apply for access
Topics
Other questions
Back
Question
How do you manage your digital books? 📚 (epubs, pdfs, etc)
If you read a lot of books and can't take physical copies of books with you, how do you keep your epubs, pdfs, and the like organized?
Or most importantly how do you avoid vendor lock-in? (Looking at you Kindle).
The closest thing I've found is Zotero because it lets us upload pdfs and epubs, saves our notes in an open format, and lets us sync reading location between devices.
Others (Scribd, Apple Books, Calibre, Libby, etc) have limitations on those three things: not letting us upload epubs/pdfs we've bought elsewhere, not syncing reading state across devices, and not letting us export our notes.
How do you manage your books?
Or most importantly how do you avoid vendor lock-in? (Looking at you Kindle).
The closest thing I've found is Zotero because it lets us upload pdfs and epubs, saves our notes in an open format, and lets us sync reading location between devices.
Others (Scribd, Apple Books, Calibre, Libby, etc) have limitations on those three things: not letting us upload epubs/pdfs we've bought elsewhere, not syncing reading state across devices, and not letting us export our notes.
How do you manage your books?
👋 Join WIP to participate
I have a tolino with books in the cloud and save other pdfs on my cloud storage, works fine for me guess cause I dont take excessive notes
Thanks I didn't know about Tolino
I ended up accepting the vendor lock-in and went with Kindle.
Having tried built my own e-reader app for a few years a long time ago, I can confidently say I'm not a fan at all of the vendor lock-in approach, but ultimately it does still provide me with the best reading experience.
It's also good to know that there are ways to break the DRM so if you ever to move away from Kindle, you should still be able to read those books. Similarly, you can import .epub's etc on your Kindle as well although it might require some work.
Calibre on macOS can help with that and is also a good tool to just manage all your ebooks.
Thanks for letting me know, and it seems like that's the reality we face. It's kind of weird if we're dependent on Amazon for like our collected knowledge... will see how it goes with Calibre
+1 for Calibre - I've also set up an online library for it using github.com/janeczku/calibre-w…
My collections are primarily books for research/teaching at uni - with the online portal I can read them on the go.
I collect them all in a folder 'Books'. Bothe .pdf, .epub . m4p (audio format). From there I will send it to Kobo, iPad of Overcast to read of listen.
After doing so, I add the data i collected to a Notion database with read books and share it to Oku.club to show others what I read.
Thanks! I didn't know that you could do that with Kobo. And just joined Oku.club. 🙏🏻
Currently I am using Calibre, but I hope that some day my app Biblogy is ready to take over.
Calibre is perfect just to throw books in there and get a nice overview. But your points are things that I want to adress with Biblogy and more (let's see how long I can keep up the motivation to work on it :D )
Very cool, I'd love to be a user. I tried out Calibre too after Zotero but haven't found a solution otherwise yet.