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.