BookSync is a rough-and-ready solution for accessing your Calibre Libraries stored on Dropbox from the internet. It is a simple web page, accessible from any device with an internet connection and a browser. (But it probably won’t work on most eReader browsers)
I am looking for beta testers. You can just go the
website to use it:
https://books.millmans.us/bluebooks.html If you click on a book title, you will get be a standard book details screen (Title, cover, author, and blurb) with a button to download the epub and/or azw formats, if available.
I wrote BookSync because of the problems people started having with Calibre Sync when Calibre modified its database structure. I was already using a personal program that looks like this one and—except for the way in which it accesses Dropbox--works the same way.
BookSync is a simple web page: it doesn’t collect any information, and it doesn’t need to be “installed” into iOS or Android to run. Although it reads files and folders in your DropBox account, it does not write to them.
Book Sync is fairly robust because it scans the Calibre folder structure, not the database and it uses standard Dropbox APIs to read file and folder data. It should be fairly low-maintenance, thus reducing the risk of becoming obsolete since it doesn’t have to keep up with the changes Apple and Google keep making to their app store requirements or changes Calibre may make to its database structure and it doesn’t need to be side-loaded. In addition, the source code is available to anyone who wants to run it (with necessary changes) from their own server.
It isn’t pretty—see screenshot. It also isn’t fast. It takes about 15-20 seconds to build the list of my 3500 books. So if you have a really big library, BookSync isn’t for you. But it provides access from anywhere to the copy of your Calibre libraries you may have on your Dropbox account
A few non-features that don’t count as bugs:
- 1. Creating the book list can be slow. This is because no information is saved and the entire Dropbox has to be scanned again.
- 2. The program shows all your Calibre books, not just the books from a single library. (In fact, it treats any folder that contains a file named “metadata.opf” as containing a book.)
- 3. The program gets the book title and author from the folder name. Since Calibre sometimes shortens book or author names when it creates folders (and sometimes changes some characters), this may not be the full title or author.
- 4. It doesn’t work with other cloud sync services: I know even less about these than I did about Dropbox. And I don’t have a Calibre library stored on any other cloud service, so I’m not going to try to extend the program to other cloud services. Any one else is welcome to do so, of course.
I am also looking for Beta Fixers. As mentioned, the source code is freely available (3 small files) and it can be run (with a few changes and some adjustments to the Dropbox console) on other servers. My general Javascript knowledge is middling and everything I know about authorizing Dropbox and accessing it through the API, I learned from Google Gemini for this project—some of it wrong. A lot of you can do a better job. I’m not a GitHub member, so send me a private message with an email address if you want the code (or just copy if from the Developer Tools).
I would also be happy to entertain ideas for a better name and an icon.
