{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2025/on-livtet",
  "description": "It's been about half a year since I've \"started\" working on Livtet and I couldn't tell you what I'm doing with it.\n",
  "path": "/essays/2025/on-livtet",
  "publishedAt": "2025-04-25T09:15:00.000Z",
  "site": "at://did:plc:e2ctbutx6kya6si4if5ngjmm/site.standard.publication/3mniussyp2d2g",
  "tags": "essay",
  "textContent": "I started working on [Livtet][] out of the annoyance of using Calibre. Sure,\nit's a venerable tool for managing one's local eBook collection but it also\ndoes _so much more_. The _presence_ of such \"_more_\" has confused me to a point\nwhere I, like the tinkerer I am, would install so many plug-ins and have\noverwhelmed my small installation. Now, having done my operating system\nreinstall, I find myself questioning if I want _that_ application in\nparticular. It's hard! The things of value I find from Calibre are:\n\n- [KOReader sync server][1]: I use [KOReader][2] as the \"reading interface\" on\n  my eReader. It handles the work of managing all of my reading positions,\n  bookmarks, highlights and includes dictionary and Wikipedia lookups. The only\n  thing this _can't_ do is check out books from places like Hoopla or Overdrive\n  but that's a limitation of the client itself: Calibre _can_ do that.\n- Cataloguing: The fact that I can add a DRM-free book, immediately get more\n  information from corpora around the Web, associate it to the social reading\n  software I'm using and keep that in sync as I read is a boon.\n\nThough the list is short, these features feel indispensable to me —\ndespite not even having Calibre installed on my machine at the moment. The\n[initial blog post I wrote about Livtet][3] was effectively a GUI over the\nCalibre API; something that's no longer useful for me.\n\nA Local Library\n\nWhat I _personally_ want is a tool that satisfies the feature list above. This\nis what prevents me from doing those little excerpt posts I used to do on my\nFediverse account. I'm not going to sit and retype what I've easily highlight\nwhen it's captured with precision already! Implementing the API needed to\nbecome a KOReader sync server isn't terribly difficult — in fact, I could\ninject the code into Livtet itself as [a sidecar application][4]. But before I\nget to that point, the act of managing one's library needs to be made more\nsimpler, at least for this tool.\n\n[livtet]: https://git.sr.ht/~jacky/livtet\n[1]: https://github.com/koreader/koreader-sync-server\n[2]: https://koreader.rocks/\n[3]: /essays/2024/making-livtet/\n[4]: https://tauri.app/develop/sidecar/",
  "title": "What's Supposed to be Different about Livtet?"
}