Does anyone know of a self hosting option for hosting ebooks? I keep hoping there is an open source library type app where I could add my ebooks and host them for myself and others.
I use Kavita to host ebooks and manga for myself. It's still work in progress, so do expect changes, though I haven't had huge issues on the stable releases so far. Besides Tachiyomi for comics/manga there aren't any native reading apps yet, so you will have to use the webinterface for the time being.
Another option often mentioned is Calibre Web, though I haven't used that myself.
I honestly prefer Kavita even though I do not download comics or manga. Their reader is so nice, specially with the themes. 0 issues on my end except for indexing, which the dev promptly fixed after I reported the issue.
I use Moon+ Reader pro on my android, and on my iOS I simply make a "webapp" of the website.
To clarify, calibre-web is not "the docker version of calibre", it's a separate project that provides a nice web frontend for an existing calibre database.
So if I understand correctly, I would spin up a Calibre docker (a la https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/calibre) and then spin up a separate Calibre-web docker and point it to the first one?
It's not as clean a solution as they'd like it to be, but for another option, Jellyfin hosts media including books. When I say "not as clean," I mean that you can stream video and music from the server, but it has you download books to read on another device. Last I heard, they were looking to integrate at least a PDF viewer into the interface, though.
Probably, though I don't know their architecture well enough to say. The discussion that I saw referred specifically to PDF.js, which I believe is what the browsers use, though.
Take a look at Calibre-Web (github.com/janeczku/calibre-we…) which I've been using for what you ask for quite a while now. As the name suggests it can also take advantage of a pre-existing Calibre eBook Database.
Of course you are right, and this should be noted.
But if you so happen to have Calibre already running via for instance your desktop installation you, may also "take advantage your pre-existing Calibre database" in Calibre-Web ;-)
Calibre is great but it’s not a server based program, it’s just a desktop client. There is Calibre-web which you can host which kinda turns it into a server but it does that by exposing a website you connect to that shows you the Calibre interface via VNC, so it’s a bit hackey.
There's a Calibre container, I believe by LinuxServer.io, that comes with this VNC setup for serving calibre in a browser window. Probably what was meant here.
Calibre-web is basically a nice UI for a file server over the calibre library.