search-fulltextLABSCO SUMMARY
Your own bookshelf, searchable by what is inside the books.
Full-text search over a personal Calibre library turns a folder of files into something you can ask questions of, and get-excerpt returns the passage with its surrounding lines rather than a hit count. It all runs through calibredb on your own machine.
What it is
A bash server over the calibredb CLI: it searches your local Calibre library by full text, author or title, and extracts passages from a book by ID.
What you get
- Full-text search across the library, with multi-word queries phrase-matched automatically
- A fuzzy fallback query that runs when the exact phrase finds nothing
- Author and title search with partial matching
- Excerpts around a keyword, with a configurable number of context lines and pagination
- Calibre deep links (calibre://) and file:// URLs back to the book itself
Requirements
Calibre installed at /Applications/calibre.app with a library at ~/Calibre Library, and a recent Bash. Excerpts read from .txt exports of your books — a title with no text export can be found but not quoted.
Setup effort
Build from source — git clone https://github.com/trieloff/calibre-mcp.git
USE CASES
01
Finding which of your books covers a topic
Search the full text; a multi-word query is phrase-matched, and the fuzzy fallback catches the case where your phrasing is not the author's.
02
Quoting a passage accurately
Search first, then extract the excerpt around the keyword so the quote comes from the book rather than from memory.
03
Locating a book you only half remember
Partial matching on title or author finds it without the exact spelling.
04
Reading around a hit rather than just seeing it
Set the context lines wider and page through the matches inside one book.
05
Opening the book once you have found it
Results come back with calibre:// deep links and file:// URLs, so the next step is a click rather than a search in the app.
4 tools
Listed in project docs. Your client may show a different list.
search-authorsearch-titleget-excerptBEFORE YOU INSTALL
What to know first
Tools you get
4 tools named in the project's documentation.
Where it runs
The documented client runs the server on your machine.
INSTALLATION
Connect your client
You clone this one yourself.
Server setup
TERMINAL
git clone https://github.com/trieloff/calibre-mcp.git
cd calibre-mcp
chmod +x calibre-mcp.shAdd the mcpServers config block to your Claude Desktop configuration
MCP Clients
Any MCP client
ANY MCP CLIENT · JSON
{
"mcpServers": {
"calibre": {
"command": "<YOUR_PATH_TO_CALIBRE_MCP>"
}
}
}
