[GUI Plugin] Calibre MCP

[sivori]

Calibre MCP lets Claude, or any other MCP client, read your calibre library: search the metadata, search inside the books, pull exact passages, and read back the highlights and notes you made in calibre's viewer.

The plugin runs a small server inside calibre on 127.0.0.1 and talks to the library through calibre's own database API, so there are no lock conflicts with the running app, and switching libraries in calibre switches what the client sees.

Main features

• Metadata search in calibre's own syntax, e.g. author:dickens or tags:Fiction and pubdate:<1900
• Full-text search inside the books, one highlighted snippet per matching book (uses calibre's full-text index)
• Passages: a longer excerpt around a match, for quoting accurately instead of from memory
• Annotations: highlights and notes from the calibre viewer, optionally filtered by book or text
• Book details (description, identifiers, custom columns) and category listings (tags, authors, series, publishers, languages)
• A toolbar button showing the server status, with start/stop and a "copy connect command" item

Special notes

• Read-only. No tool can change a book, a tag or a highlight.
• Local only. The server listens on 127.0.0.1 and is not reachable from other machines. It rejects requests whose Host or Origin header isn't localhost, so a web page can't reach it.
• calibre's template: searches are disabled, because templates can run Python.
• No authentication: any program on your own computer can read the library while calibre is running.
• Searching inside books needs full-text search turned on: Preferences > Searching > Full text search. Metadata search and annotations work without it.
• Standard-library Python only; nothing extra to install.

Installation

1. Download the zip attached to this post.
2. In calibre: Preferences > Plugins > Load plugin from file, choose the zip, and restart calibre.
3. Optional: add the MCP button under Preferences > Toolbars & menus.
4. Connect your MCP client to http://127.0.0.1:8395/mcp. For Claude Code:
   

   claude mcp add --transport http calibre http://127.0.0.1:8395/mcp

   There is also a Claude plugin with setup instructions in the project README.

The port (default 8395) and whether the server starts with calibre are under Preferences > Plugins > Calibre MCP > Customize plugin.

Requirements: calibre 6 or later. Windows, macOS and Linux.

Source, issues and full documentation: https://github.com/sivori/calibre-mcp (GPL v3)

Version history

• 0.2.1 (2026-10-05): toolbar icon is now SVG.
• 0.2.0 (2026-10-05): tool titles; Claude plugin bundle in the repository.
• 0.1.1 (2026-10-04): security fixes: template searches disabled, Host header check, request size limit.
• 0.1.0 (2026-10-04): first release.