Android app similar to Kuboo (ubooquity) for COPS and calibre

[zundengan]

Hello,

I will explain my setup, i have QNAP Nas, but i don´t want to use HDStation (which is using nas like a pc on a screen instead of accessing apps to browser), so i have calibre on my pc and my calibre library on a NAS shared folder, not advised but it works, so i also do not want to use my pc as 24/7 server.

I managed to install calibre2opds - COPS with my calibre library folder with docker on container station, yeah hurray iam so smart for a noob and non it guy i thought, but then when i wanted to use it on android... bummer, i cannot do what iam thinking and i knew from ubooquity opds server... well maybe i just don´t know the concepts of what is what so iam imagining stuff.

The thing is with ubooquity i access my comics via browser with no need to download stuff and surprisingly a nice guy made the kuboo app where i don´t need to download stuff to my tablet or phone or whatever to read my comics.

The thing is i could copy paste my ebooks from calibre to a uboooquity folder and duplicate all the stuff, but unfortunately, some of the ebooks don't get the embed metadata right, so no book covers on ubooquity and turns out ugly.

And i also would like comics in one place... "grown man" books on another place.

I tried moon reader, and all other apps.... and i must be a really dumb guy because i can manage to make a library, and see my catalog, but i can't get the little bastard books on the bookshelf of the apps without downloading to my sd card, for a cheap tablet with dual boot, i think i cannot manage to have my all library stored there, again duplicating space, i just want to stream my books from my server without downloading, but of course having that option... and no i didn´t try no cloud service, i could but i don´t want to use it in that way, i want to stream... but of course i can copy paste my folders to google drive just for a backup.

Can please someone help, is this possible to stream the books and also have a pretty nice bookshelf to show for the house visitors (tablet visitors), i am going mental on this because i could not find an explicit answer nor a well-designed app where i could duplicate a behavior like ubooquity and kuboo does.

Help please.

[binarymeadow]

Your setup makes complete sense, and you are not a dumb guy at all. What you are describing is exactly what Kuboo did: browse the server and stream, without copying anything onto the device first. The good news is that Ubooquity, COPS and Calibre all speak OPDS (its basically a standard format for reading content), so the only missing piece is a client app that streams properly and actually looks nice.

I was in the same boat. I ran Ubooquity and read on my phone with Kuboo for years, then Kuboo died and nothing replaced it. So I built my own reader, OPDSy, an OPDS comic and ebook reader. (Full disclosure: I am the developer. It is a paid app, a one time £3.49, with no ads and no subscription). Ive improved on the design for Kudoo tho (which frustratingly split comics and books into two sepparate folders). Ive also added reading status and memory which was also missing

How it fits what you asked for:

• Streaming, not downloading. Comics stream a page at a time over OPDS PSE, and ebooks open straight from the server. Saving something for offline is there if you ever want it on that cheap tablet, but it is always optional, never required. I basically download some content on my one for when im in a underground train ... but for the most part i stream.

• One tidy bookshelf. You add each server as a source and OPDSy shows them together in one clean library, with a colour badge per source so you can see at a glance where each item lives. Nice to show off to the house visitors. It looks beautiful when you got a bit collection.

• Comics in one place, your other books in another. Because each Ubooquity or Calibre folder comes through as its own source, you can keep your comics and your other books apart and still browse them from the same app. No need to copy books into Ubooquity or duplicate anything.

• Works with what you already have. Ubooquity, COPS and Calibre all expose OPDS, so you just point OPDSy at each one and you are reading in seconds. Each source loads on its own, so one slow or offline server never breaks the rest of your library.

One Ubooquity note, since many apps trip over this: Ubooquity advertises its comic page link as an image, but that address actually serves the HTML web reader, so a lot of clients show blank comic pages. OPDSy detects this and requests the real page endpoint, so comics stream correctly.

It also offers paged or continuous scrolling, left to right or right to left for manga, and it can read your ebooks aloud with your device voices if you ever fancy listening.

You can download it here on the google play store

Give it a try against your COPS and Ubooquity servers and let me know how it goes. If anything misbehaves on your setup, tell me and I will happily fix it.