An ebook library

Since I bought our first Kindle ebook reader in 2011, I made it a habit of not buying paper books. Since then, my collection has grown to over 300 digital books. Over time, I bought books not only from Amazon, but some from publishers directly, some from aggregators like HumbleBundle, some directly from the authors.

I attempt to gather all books in a single directory on a network drive. However, the files alone give little hint as to their contents. At some point, I wanted to be able to browse my collection and hacked together a quick web app with SQlite database as backing. Later I discovered that the command line tool ebook-meta from within calibre can extract book covers.

This database has served me well for a year or two. Last weekend during a longer train trip though, I finally made the move to import my ebook collection into Knowfox. I even added an open source EPUB reader.

I am very happy with the result. Ebooks are finally part of my collected digital knowledge base. With the integrated ebook reader, I can directly reference books and passages from within my notes. Here are the meta data of a book:

And this is the integrated ebook reader: