This Self-Hosted Book App Might Be Too Good Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Hello everybody. This is Tech Hut and what we're going to be doing is checking out an application, a self-hosted utility that might be too perfect and that is Book Orbit here. You've seen me look at quite a few different tools similar to this one primarily for media organization. You have things like sonar seer and all of those. When it comes to this, this is specifically focused for books and ebooks.

00:22 So, in that case, you might be using something like this here if you're trying to self-host your books. Another great one is audiobook shelf for audiobooks. But what Book Orbit here does is it takes the the fantastic features of all those other tools, puts it into one and then adds a kind of overseer seer type functionality directly to it. They have a try it live button right here.

00:45 So you could go ahead and dive into their instance. But I am going to show you mine. I haven't been using it too much, but I've been trying it out. And you can see it is absolutely stacked. We're just going to kind of do a walkthrough of the UI and then I'm going to show you how I actually have it set up. But before we do all that, you're going to want to be comfortable when you're reading.

01:05 And that's where today's sponsor, Liberovo, comes in to help. I am a larger person. Both height and unfortunately weight. And some of the big and tall chairs that you see on the market are just regular chairs scaled up. The headrests don't reach. The arms are too shallow. It's just not comfortable. The chair I've been using here for the last couple weeks.

01:24 This is the Maxis, and this is designed to make you comfortable no matter how big you are. 52 cm seat depth, so your thighs are actually supported, armrests that curve out, and a headrest with real travel to it, which matters if you are tall through the shoulders. And I've tried a lot of chairs. The back rest on this one is by far my favorite. Eight flexible panels and a linkage system, so when you lean, it follows you.

01:47 And same with the neck support and armrests. You're not reaching for a lever every 10 minutes to make an adjustment. Then there's Omni Stretch, a fiveminute compression cycle. You lean back, hit the button, and the lumbar support works its way up and down your spine. And if that's not enough for you, this one has a fan in the seat pulling air down through the cushion.

02:06 And it actually runs off this battery that's in the chair. Easy to pop out and charge up. It's rated up to 399 pounds, and it's built for people who are 510 to 67. If you're outside of that range, I'd look at their Omni line instead. Links to their site and Amazon will be down below. So, let's get back into it. So, we're logged in here. You could see it says, "Good night, Brandon."

02:28 And it gives you some statistics and things to kind of help you track progress and see achievements. You can see I have a one-day streak. One day, best of seven days. Not very good for me, honestly. I'll be straight. This is more of a collection tool and a tracking tool. Kind of like a self-hosted Goodreads in a way. At least for me, I prefer to read paper whenever possible.

02:50 But what I find myself doing is discovering and trying out maybe a chapter or two here and then going and picking up an actual title. That's just how I'm doing it. It's all up to you how you want to do it. You can see my continue reading here. We have our goal. I want to read six books by the end of the year. That would be nice. After I go through about five books through here, it's going to give me my DNA.

03:12 And I could keep going over to see how many pages I've read in the month. And if I keep going, there's a lot more statistics on this. You can see I haven't touched it for a minute because I found a book and I've been reading it. When I'm done with it, I'll probably go on here and mark it as read just so I could kind of keep track. But of course, you can read books directly on here.

03:27 Um, one, you can see under the recently added, I have The Alchemist. This is a fantastic book. I'm not going to flip through it too much for copyright reasons. You should probably go out and buy it. But by golly, I could not recommend this book enough. has a pretty simple e-reader kind of functionality. It works really good on mobile phone, which is nice.

03:47 But you can see I can see the percent actually looked at. We have breaks here. So, if I skip ahead, you can see that's the end of part one. And that's really it. It's simple. You don't need too much going on here. If I click on this, I can manually type in a page or a percent. Overall, it's a nice reader. If I go up here, we can quickly view the table of contents, our marks, and notes directly in here, which is nice.

04:11 If I close the sidebar, you could also toggle a bookmark. You could search in the book. You can enable, disable the footer. You can view all the various keyboard shortcuts here. Enter full screen mode. Or if we click on settings here, this is where you could kind of customize your reading experience. So let's say I want dark mode, maybe some ember. You could change the font if you would like to and just any other setting that you would expect.

04:35 The line spacing, the paragraph spacing, and all these settings to go and change all this is real nice, especially if you're on a phone, for example. You can kind of customize it to make your reading experience actually nice. You can set it to scroll if that's what you prefer. And then you do have some advanced layout settings. Uh let's go ahead and go back cuz that's basically it when it comes to the actual e-reading functionality.

04:58 You may notice on here I got these shorter ones. These are audiobooks. So if I go into this Winston Churchill audiobook, I'm not going to play it for copyright sake, but you can change the speed. You can easily see the chapters right here and add bookmarks. So you can have multiple bookmarks, whether you're listening or reading. So if there's a spot of it that stands out to you that you want to go back and read or relisten to, bookmarks are a great tool for that.

05:27 The sleep is really cool. So, if you want to fall asleep having somebody read you a book, you can set it to like 60 minutes and it will eventually stop. Up here under settings, not nearly as much as the reading functionality, but you can see we can skip skip forward and control the volume through here, which is fantastic. Here we have discover something new.

05:45 One thing I'll note, try not to judge some of the things I have on here. Just cuz it's there doesn't mean I liked it. But you you have a good dashboard here where you can see a lot of information. If we go over to BookDoc, this is where it makes it really easy to upload things into your server. And then we have requests. This I'm not going to get too deep into setting it up.

06:03 You could read their documentation, but this works very similar to something like Sonar or Radar. You have to hook it up to an indexer, a downloader, all kinds of things. But it it's pretty cool. Apparently, these are some popular copyright free books, The Life of a Bee. So, if I grabbed this and I just searched it here, for example, you could see it actually pulls up and it's pulling up from a variety of sources.

06:28 So, it's quite schnazzy. We have tools, so you can easily edit like authors, for example, if you wanted to add more details, change some things up. You have bulk rename. You can find duplicate books with this and missing resources. So, if I run a check, it doesn't look I'm missing anything, which is nice. And then we have browsing. So, if I browse by author, you could see all that.

06:48 Uh, it'd be cool if their pictures would kind of render in here automatically, but it doesn't look like it. We have series, so I only have one series and one volume of that series in here. But when you're in a book page specifically, you can see a lot of information, what it's about, show more to see some more information if you want to. You can edit the meta data, which this brings up a lot of things that you can add and change.

07:10 So, we have our genres, our ISBN numbers, full descriptions, but here you can save. If I click on this picture or uh find cover online, that's what I'm looking for. We can find covers and you can switch it out easily here if you would like to or if it pulled something that's not really accurate, it's easy to uh manipulate it. If I go over here, you can see the files.

07:31 So, I have the information for that, where it is and all that. We have a log which goes into a crazy amount of detail which kind of sucks that I prefer paper but yeah I I am missing out on some of this like more granular data but it's not completely necessary this is and then highlights it just gives us some more stuff we can sync with a couple different services or open the reader now from there we could go into settings I have two libraries I have audiobooks and books we can see the distribution we can see our watch

08:05 folders We can scan directly through here and you can add libraries. So you just name it, give it an icon and set everything up. If I go over to books, do this little drop down, we can see a lot of information about this specific library. If I open this up and edit the library, this is where I can kind of show you the folders. So I just have it books, ebooks, which this actually links to a network share.

08:30 So all my books are pulled from the uh the data share that I have on Unrade. And you got more stuff for scanning, metadata, reading there. There's just so much things going on in this tool that it's impossible to cover everything. And their documentation is actually pretty nice and extensive. We have some more library stuff including metadata. You can select where this data is actually pulled from.

08:52 Some of them do require set up if you want to use them, but it work seems to be working pretty good with just these uh kind of public defaults that we have. There's a variety of devices that you can set up. I do wish they had a mobile app. They don't yet, but that's something I got my fingers crossed for. You could set up a variety of accounts. And then you have some server settings.

09:11 So, this is where you would set up those things that I talked about earlier. And there's really a heck of a lot more. Getting this set up is pretty simple. I here ls. It's a s simple docker compose file. And I have a data directory which has like the database and all that stuff stored. But we have our app here which this is our book orbit app. It does have an env file.

09:34 So you can see app image required there. We have our ports running on 3000 and most of this Postgress stuff and everything is environmental variables which go into that. ENV but pretty simple stuff when it comes to docker time zone user groups. You're going to want to set that to uh whatever your user group is generally a,000,000 which it seems to be doing by default.

09:54 It is using Postgress for the database which seems kind of overkill for what it is. I think they could have gotten away with a SQLite like integrated database into the container but that's just me. If we go over to Book Orbit and head on to the docs under installation here, I just followed their installation steps which involves pulling the ENV and compose.

10:19 Within the ENV, you're going to want to edit your uh HTTP address right here. I have it running through my um EngineX proxy manager which I have set up through Netbird so I can easily access it. Uh if you want to learn more on how to do that, that's a great prerequisite for this video if you're setting that up for the very first time. But of course, you can access it just through LAN address if you would like to.

10:42 You just need to switch this out for your actual server's LAN IP address. We have our host path. So, this is where on the actual machine it's going to be or where your books are. So, you may need to mount a share if that's how you're doing it. And if you don't know how to do that on my GitHub for my home lab, I have uh a guide that's in my opinion relatively helpful.

11:06 And then it's just Docker Compose you. So, you start it up with a Docker Compose update. They have extra information for like unread installations and more details. Again, this app is loaded with features and functionality. So, do check out their documentation as well as my writeup on techhut.tv if you are interested. And with all that, check out Libernovo.

11:29 Fantastic chairs that has definitely made reading a much comfier experience. And with all that, the videos that I talked about are linked here. Have a beautiful day and goodbye.