(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.
Sorry to see this, but it was de facto unusable since long time. Adapting the radarr approach to books just wasn't working right, beside all the other issues
That's painful. I hate opening up my containers for permanent shutdown. What's the best 1:1 alternative? I'd like to keep it as close to *arr as possible due to me being a slow learner
I plan to continue using readarr with rreading-glasses until a suitable replacement appears.
Only other alternative I'm aware of is LazyLibrarian which is what readarr set out to replace. I use it to pipe top selling book feeds into readarr lists to auto add new books.
LazyLibrarian seems to be the most viable alternative. It has always been overshadowed by Readarr, mostly because everyone wanted to stay within the *arr stack. But maybe with Readarr shutting down, we’ll get some more community support for LL.
I used lazy librarian years ago; actually it was one of the first local services I ran. Tried it more recently and had install issues; I think possibly due to my squeamishness around docker. The main dev seems helpful and consistently active.
Yeah, Readarr is very awkward to use, but still sad to see going away. If the main problem is just a usable metadata server, maybe someone can save the project without much trouble.
Lidarr is similarly strange with it's focus on artists and albums only, and apparently refusing to implement song search.
I feel like the developers of these two projects don't actually use their own software to encounter the huge pain points, but maybe they have a use case that I don't understand.
I only recently found out about rreading glasses which completely fixed the meta data issues. I hope they reconsider or someone else jumps in. I would if I understood any of this beyond a user level.
I'm not sure if I properly get the concept but it seems that rreading-glasses is something you use in addition to readarr not an independent application.
Correct. Readarr’s biggest issue was that the metadata server was almost always offline/horribly rate limited. And Readarr was built in a way that you couldn’t add new media requests without a working metadata server. So oftentimes, you simply couldn’t add any media to your requests.
Rreading-glasses is an open source metadata server that you can point Readarr at. It simply solves the metadata server issues.