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.

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.

#selfhosted