<story><title>Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app</title><url>https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel</url><text>Hey folks! This winter I&amp;#x27;ve been building Citadel to scratch my itch of managing ebooks without using Calibre. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it&amp;#x27;s slow and awkward to use.&lt;p&gt;I dreamed of writing a native app (and originally tried this in Swift), but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri (Svelte on the frontend + Rust on the backend) to have a cross-platform desktop app. Plus, Citadel supports running in a headless &amp;#x2F; webbrowser mode. You can self-host a Citadel server that manages your library, and connect to it from anywhere with the web.&lt;p&gt;This is SUPER early software. Honestly, I&amp;#x27;m a bit embarrassed to post it here — but I wanted folks to know that I&amp;#x27;m building a tool to replace Calibre. If you&amp;#x27;d like to help build it, I&amp;#x27;d love the help! If you just want to follow the journey, please do!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>asimpletune</author><text>Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>para_parolu</author><text>It is incredibly slow and unstable. I spent literally weeks adding large (100gb library) into it. I had to add chunk by chunk. It was crashing constantly and process was so slow that I moved it to a separate machine. Then I tried to use web interface to search and it was super slow.&lt;p&gt;And I’m not even talking about non intuitive UI. For something that has supposed to be a library it’s nowhere near real library (alphabetical list of authors).</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Citadel – a Calibre-compatible eBook management app</title><url>https://github.com/every-day-things/citadel</url><text>Hey folks! This winter I&amp;#x27;ve been building Citadel to scratch my itch of managing ebooks without using Calibre. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it&amp;#x27;s slow and awkward to use.&lt;p&gt;I dreamed of writing a native app (and originally tried this in Swift), but ran into issues building the UI. Plus, whatever I built would only work on macOS. I started writing Citadel using Tauri (Svelte on the frontend + Rust on the backend) to have a cross-platform desktop app. Plus, Citadel supports running in a headless &amp;#x2F; webbrowser mode. You can self-host a Citadel server that manages your library, and connect to it from anywhere with the web.&lt;p&gt;This is SUPER early software. Honestly, I&amp;#x27;m a bit embarrassed to post it here — but I wanted folks to know that I&amp;#x27;m building a tool to replace Calibre. If you&amp;#x27;d like to help build it, I&amp;#x27;d love the help! If you just want to follow the journey, please do!</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>asimpletune</author><text>Sometimes I feel that if Calibre just looked better people would realize how amazing it is. It’s honestly not that bad (I actually love it) but I think people can’t get past the aesthetic.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>smivan</author><text>The challenge that I face is Calibre absolutely craters after 20,000+ ebooks.&lt;p&gt;I understand that most folks probably have 10-300 books, but in my case I have some large libraries I tried to use with Calibre, and it just absolutely DIES.&lt;p&gt;The steadfast decision to exclusively use SQLite doesn&amp;#x27;t help. I opened a PR back in 2016 or so, but the maintainer was quite enthusiastically opposed to changing the DB layer or making it pluggable.</text></comment>