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Getting the Most from Ebooks, A Mostly Free Workflow
Universal Apps
One of my passions over the past few months has been growing and curating my collection of ebooks. I've loved reading longer than I've loved computers, but now I love both and this is how I married the two together. As a Mac and iOS user who also has a self-hosted server, I've tried a lot of different apps in an ongoing effort to craft the best workflow.
Background
I was an Amazon customer for a long time, but in February of 2025, the company decided it would no longer allow customers to download their books as user-maintained files and limited them to access with Internet-connected Amazon-approved devices, and implicitly acknowledged that they could and would remove your access to your purchases at their discretion. Before their deadline arrived, I downloaded a thousand+ ebooks and audiobooks I'd purchased over the years. I removed the digital rights management restrictions from my property. Now I can use whatever device I want. I can convert the books to different formats and I can loan them to friends, just like the physical books I purchase at brick-and-mortar stores.
Getting New Books
You can let your conscience be your guide. I still purchase books sold without DRM from various sources, but I also use:
Library Management
Although some UI snobs don't care for its idiosyncratic interface, I use and love Calibre and its many plugins. I can't think of anything I want it to do that it can't handle. Its killer features include:
- Metadata including covers, tags, authors, publishers, series, publication date, format, acquisition date, ratings, and custom fields for user-defined data like read/unread.
- Built-in OPDS server for use with third-party apps providing remote access for e-reader software and downloaders.
- Easy to craft and save complex queries— e.g., science fiction books about time travel published in the 80s rated 3 stars or above or biographies of rock musicians from England published by Oxford Press.
- Import covers and metadata from dozens of sources.
- Combine books to make your own omnibus editions.
- Create virtual libraries for ease of management. Books can belong to multiple virtual libraries.
- Supports a huge number of formats: PUB, PDF, MOBI, AZW, AZW3, DOCX, RTF, TXT, HTML, HTM, ODT, LIT, FB2, PDB, CBZ, CBR, DJVU, CHM, HTMLZ.
- Offers format conversion.
- Remove DRM via a plugin.
Apple's own Books app lets you import and read only three formats: pub, PDF, and iBook. It chokes on DRM. It also lacks queries beyond a basic search for authors and titles. It is very much geared towards selling you new books from Apple's bookstore. I only use it for backup.
Remote Access
I use an Intel MacBook as a daily driver for ebook management. When I am at home, I can use its built-in web server to browse my library on my iPhone and iPad. For remote access and to share with friends and family, I use Syncthing to keep a mirrored copy of my database on my self-hosted server. I run Calibre-Web a free third-party app in a Docker container that I connected to the Internet with a free Cloudflare zero-trust tunnel. Calibre-Web has a built-in OPDS service that connects to apps like Readest and MapleRead, so that I can do queries, read metadata, and download books on a device from anywhere with Internet connectivity.
Reading
I've been using MapleRead SE($8.99), the edition of the software with the biggest feature set. Other editions don't handle PDFs, and the free edition has a five-book limit. The full-featured edition offers extensive formatting of fonts, themes, and highlights. If you need or want language support, it has good tools for search, lookup, translation, highlighting, notes, and vocabulary lists. You can use text-to-speech to turn any book into a pseudo-audiobook. There are multiple ways to get content into your library, which will sync across platforms.
I am testing a relatively new, free, and open-source ebook app, Readest, an offshoot of the Linux app, Foliate, with a richer set of features and support for more platforms. Readest can do a lot of what MapleRead does, in fact, more in some areas, not so much in others. It supports more formats: EPUB, MOBI, AZW3 (Kindle), FB2, CBZ/CBR (comics), TXT, and PDF. The PDF support is new and has some rough edges. At present, I would not use it as my primary PDF reader if you are dependent on those documents for important work. Readest will sync notes and highlights across devices, but it doesn't handle uploading, so you'll have to do that manually if you want that feature to work as intended. One nice feature is the ability to load two books simultaneously, handy if you are working on your language skills and want to see the same book in different languages at the same time.
Community
Goodreads is the OG of Internet book communities and at its inception created a lot of innovative tools. Today it's owned by Amazon, rarely adds new features and is used for data harvesting and to to steer you towards the walled garden of its billionaire owner. There are plenty of other apps and websites out there for book lovers and I encourage you to find one where you fit in.