Hey folks! This winter I've been building Citadel to scratch my itch of managing ebooks without using Calibre. Calibre is incredibly powerful, but it's slow and awkward to use.
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 / webbrowser mode. You can self-host a Citadel server that manages your library, and connect to it from anywhere with the web.
This is SUPER early software. Honestly, I'm a bit embarrassed to post it here — but I wanted folks to know that I'm building a tool to replace Calibre. If you'd like to help build it, I'd love the help! If you just want to follow the journey, please do!
Right now, this is a hobby project — I'm more interested in having fun building (rough!!) software than worried about extending existing projects. Plus, with how Citadel is designed to be backwards compatible with Calibre, you can continue to use Calibre Web.
As well, I've organized the backend so that all the Calibre-facing code is its own library, which (in the future!) others can use for their own projects. A Calibre library CLI, anyone?