Making Livtet: A Project for Book Lovers

I wrote a bit about my goal with a project for books and the things that led to its inspiration. Now I'd like to share it with you all. In short, it's a project that's meant to replace my use of Calibre, a venerable solution for folks wanting to work with their book collections. If you haven't, I suggest reading a bit about its history; there's a reason it's the go-to solution for a lot of people. However, my want and use for Calibre extends beyond its current capacity. I've created a page for it with its feature list. So far, I've managed to make something that can pull in the books I have in my Calibre collection. That led me to develop a small create around doing so. What I have built so far is what I'm hoping will encourage folks to noodle around the code to help flesh things out.

What there's now Here's what it looks like today; with some changes I've made:

The most notable changes include the use of cacache to store information from Calibre; it doesn't seem to allow for fetching individual information about books so this avoids that by storing the main index to disk. I've also managed to get a consistent enough interface to view books in a library from a search and view an individual book as well.

What I'm working on I'm eager to continuing working on this; some things I'm actively working on are:

Introducing a plugin-system: I want to have support for pulling in libraries from different locations. A personal goal is to get my audiobooks from Libro.fm to show up here! You can throw some ideas for it at https://todo.sr.ht/jacky/livtet/2. Keeping things within SQLite and the file system: I'm banking hard on SQLite as the "means of storage" for things like search as it's pretty decent at that. I have an experimental module of code that's using tantivy that needs some more love. Expanding the visual experience: I am not a visual designer 😆 but I have opinions on how I want things like books to appear.

I'm open to feedback about this and would like to hear your thoughts! Feel free to e-mail them!

What I'd like to see next I'm really interested, after working on the above to start exploring the following:

Synchronization: At first, I'd want to see if I can have an instance of Livtet on desktop sync with a headless instance somewhere. I'm thinking about doing this to help encourage folks to make their own Web interfaces

• A reference Web interface: As I tend to mention books a lot in my weeknotes, having a way to pull in the exact parts I mention in a book and the notes around will be super helpful. That's influencing how I'm thinking about its Web interface.

Keeping it Going Now, it's pretty early for me to even consider this but I figure now's better than never. I've launched this project as one to be funded via Comradery primarily. I'll be posting more in the moment updates about how Livtet is growing on there and I'd love to help expand the use of cooperatively owned software to help software I'd eventually like to see mature to be the such as well! If you want to help support the development, please help out by either e-mailing ideas or going to the funding page at https://comradery.co/livtet. You can also support me on Ko-Fi, if that's easier. Thank you so much!

I know that it might seem to be early for me to set up funding for this project. I'm hoping that by doing so, it both validates this project as being something interesting enough for people to fund and provides me with a public display of engineering craftsmanship, something that's hard to do since most of the places I worked at didn't have a lot of opportunity to do the such.