RETIRED: Readarr - Sonarr for Ebooks Book Manager and Automation
RETIRED: Readarr - Sonarr for Ebooks Book Manager and Automation
(I am not affiliated with the project at all, just an end user.)
Announcement: Retirement of Readarr
We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.
Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we're not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.
Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.
Key Points
- Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
- Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
- Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
- Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
- Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.
Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.
Sincerely,
The Servarr Team
The github repo has been archived.
Fixed Lidarr: https://github.com/blampe/hearring-aid
And Radarr: https://github.com/blampe/rreading-glasses
Basically they replace the broken closed source metadata server for both with a working one.
The author is also in talks with Readarr to take over the project.
Wait, Lidarr also has broken metadata search?
The metadata proxy that mirrors musicbrainz DB is broken (read: Imploded).
For now artist/album search is broken.
Dunno about metadata-tagging for existing entries
I noticed that my Ansible playbook failed to do a docker pull on readarr, I just commented it and was going to investigate further today. This sucks, especially because rreading-glasses did in fact completely solve the issue they're facing. Not sure why they didn't consider migrating to it officially, it's only a config change.
Readerr have been removed everywhere on rreading-glasses readme, maybe there is something related to law issues ? Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it
Yeah, it's probably a legal thing, rreading-glasses is just metadata for books, completely legal, but readarr legality is less clear, so maybe they're trying to prevent issues.
Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it
Say you want to grab a book by Isaac Asimov, you type the name of the book in readarr search bar, readarr contacts a metadata provider to show you cover images, author, date, etc. Then when you select the book readarr uses that metadata to search for downloads and ensure you're getting the correct book and not another random book with the same name.
The problem is that readarr uses a closed source API for it's metadata, and it's constantly offline, which makes it impossible to use readarr. Luckily they allow you to customize the URL for the API, and rreading-glasses is an open source implementation of that API that you can use as a drop in replacement.
Because one of the main issues is they also don’t have anyone maintaining the project. There’s no one to make the config change.
Yeah this sucks but honestly it never really worked well for me, ebooks are horribly underserved in the media world.
Having to run two instances to support audio and text books was the deal breaker for me.
Now I use audiobookshelf, and it's easy enough to find everything I need on mam without an extra search layer.
They're kind of small enough that if I want a PDF, I can just google it and download it from some random foreign university who are hosting it for some reason. You'd likely struggle to find more obscure stuff that way though.
The media world huh?
You know exactly what I'm referring to
I'm generally pretty happy with LazyLibrarian. I know people get really excited about the *arr stack, but Readarr never worked well for ebooks. It was maybe a little better at finding audiobooks, but LL is getting better at that.
Yeah same
I used LL years ago before I got into any of the arrs. I was planning to return to it but ran into some sort of install/dependency issues. Maybe I'll give it another whirl in case they've solved spontaneously.
Any alternative apart from lazylibrarian ?
Not anything that I have found, but at least LL is pretty solid. It may actually help development if LL gets some more focus from the community; It sort of got overshadowed by Readarr, simply because people wanted to stay within the *arr ecosystem.
Audiobookshelf and LL are it. Or calibre automation but it sucks.
Not that I'm happy about this or anything, I think competition is good.
But I never got readarr to work properly, it seemed to have a workflow that was unintuitive to me, compared to Radarr and Sonarr.
Problem was the underlying metadata which was either outdated or incorrect
I was just getting this set up, this and the music one, because I want to leave Spotify. Hopefully an alternative solution shows up.
I can't offer any specific advice but there seem to be a great many projects going to fill this need:
https://alternativeto.net/software/spotify/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted
Sad news :(
How would this have compared to Calibre's OPDS function? I've used that for years with no issues.
Not related. Readarr was more like lazylib
That's why that docker pull couldn't find it earlier