Can a NAS serve as an e-book library? Books and comics are packed into two free containers, and the family can freely browse through ten years of accumulated inventory

last month, during a thorough cleaning, I sorted through the e-books and comics I'd saved up for over ten years. Without sorting, I wouldn't know: three thousand books were scattered across three places—a batch on an old portable hard drive, a batch on Baidu Netdisk, and a batch of PDFs lying in WeChat favorites; The comic is even more outrageous—over 180GB of CBZ compressed files, all saved up one by one from the past. Whenever I wanted to see something, I would spend ten minutes first looking for where the documents were. The NAS at home has been running for over two years. Movies are managed by Jellyfin, music by Navidrome, photos by albums, and books and comics are still living a wandering life. This time, I moved them all into the NAS, installed two free containers, one for books and one for comics, and used it for a month. Let me explain how they were installed and where the pitfalls were.

first distinguish: books and comics are two different things

think carefully before making a move, otherwise it's easy to make a mistake later. Books and comics may seem like 'things to read,' but in reality, what you want is completely different.

book requires bookshelf logic : arrange by author and title, be searchable, view the cover wall, and ideally know which chapter you've read. Manga requires of page-turning logic: a work has dozens of volumes, arranged by volume number. When you see volume 38, page 120, you can flip it again. Japanese manga still has to be read from right to left. If you manage comics with the book's approach, or vice versa, both feel awkward.

so I didn't find an 'all-round library,' but instead installed two separate ones: calibre-web manages books, Komga manages comics. All are Docker containers, installed in the same way as Docker before—once you know one, you'll move on. Together, the two take up less than one Jellyfin's memory, so the N100 runs without any pressure.

management book's calibre-web: stuck on the metadata.db for quite a while

Let's talk about the book keeper first. calibre-web is the web version of the well-established e-book management software Calibre; just pull the Docker mirror and it can run. There are just three parameters: port mapping 8083, the library directory is attached to /books in the container, and the configuration directory is listed to place the database.

first pitfall that day: the container was opened, the webpage could open, but the bookshelf was empty, and the upload button was gray. After searching for a long time, I realized that calibre-web isn't something you just throw in a bunch of PDFs—it needs a database file generated by Calibre desktop version of metadata.db in the library directory. Without this file, the interface returns an empty message. Many people online have fallen for this step.

solution is simple: install a desktop version of Calibre on your computer, create a new empty library, copy the generated metadata.db separately to the NAS's book directory, restart the container, and the bookshelf will be active. Then, in the management interface, enable "Allow uploads," and FamilyMart can transfer books to them themselves. By the way, the first thing you do after entering is to change the default password. The initial account for this thing is the public admin/admin123. If you don't change it, you're basically leaving naked.

Once you

the book, you can access the cover wall, search, and author categories. You can just open EPUB on the webpage and read it without downloading. Don't expect the old tutorial to "one-click scraping on Douban" anymore—Douban's interface was shut down long ago, and covers and author info are mostly manually added. Another truth: calibre-web has a feature to push books to Kindle, which is just for show on the Chinese Kindle—push delivery service stopped mid-2024. My Kindle still uses USB transfers or simply uses WeChat for web reading. I wrote about both approaches in my article about reusing old Kindles .

Comics' Komga: The folder is the bookshelf

Komga is less hassle-free than calibre-web because you don't even have to worry about the database. folder structure is like a bookshelf structure: each comic has a folder, and each CBZ file in the folder is a volume, automatically grouped into a "series," with volumes and progress counted for you.

deployment also uses three standard parameters: the official Gotson/Komga for the image, /data for the comic directory, and /config for the configuration. Here's a pitfall worth mentioning: the new Komga monitors the port inside the container as 25600, not the 8080 mentioned in common tutorials—I followed the tutorial from two years ago and entered 8080:8080, which turned out completely blank, so I immediately switched to 25600. Even copying tutorials means copying new ones. The software changes its default every year, and if old articles aren't updated, the traps you fall into are left by them.

format, comic enthusiasts basically have no blind spots: CBZ, ZIP, CBR, RAR, PDF, EPUB are all accepted. My 180GB inventory is imported directly without any format conversion. Over 180GB of compressed files, over 700 files. The first full library scan took more than ten minutes, then incremental scans were done quickly.

web reader is Komga's specialty: it can easily switch between single or double pages, adapts to screen width, and in the series settings, the reading direction has been changed to "right to left," making the page-turning feel the same way as physical books. The best part is progress memory —it remembers every page it sees. I read halfway through the study computer, then pick up the tablet at night to continue reading and resume immediately. From then on, my wife removed the comic app, saying things like, "You don't even spend money and don't have ads."

How to read

phones and tablets: OPDS clarified in one word

after installing two libraries, how do you view them on your phone? There's a term here called OPDS, which basically means the "subscription catalog" agreement in the book repository world—add a server address and account to the reading app, and your bookshelf is fully loaded into the app, like a cloud storage client, but you're reading your own books.

Android phone, I use Moon+ Reader, add the OPDS directory, fill in the address for calibre-web (add /opds after port 8083) and the account, and the bookshelf will appear directly; Read the manga and follow Komga's OPDS source. Apple tried KyBook and Panels, both connect, and Panels feels the best for flipping comics. If you find installing apps troublesome, opening the web version directly on a tablet browser is the easiest way. My wife is a web enthusiast, so progress is still tracked. If you're out and about, you can flip through a couple of pages, and with remote access, you can get back connected. Reading comics is a bit tricky for data, but reading books is very economical.

pour cold water on this: Kindle shouldn't mess with OPDS. That experimental browser is really hard to open such pages, so honestly using it as a "USB reader" is actually the most respectable way for it to live in its later years.

two pitfalls of the warehouse, I stepped into them one by one

named pit is the most troublesome. comic folder, don't name it randomly. Mix 'One Piece,' 'ONE PIECE,' and 'One Piece' together, and Komga will treat them as three series. Volume numbers must be filled with zeros: Volume 1 is written as 01, Volume 10 as 10, otherwise 10 will be placed before 2 in sorting, and OCD will die on the spot. The same goes for books—if the file name is messy, searching basically depends on fate.

PDF is the second biggest pitfall. hundreds of megabytes of scanned PDFs open slowly on calibre-web pages, and the covers load slowly. For these lengthy tasks, my experience is to download them locally from the webpage before viewing; don't wait for the page to render.

account, don't be lazy. set up a reader-only account for the child, authorizing separate catalogs for study materials and suitable books. The parental control approach is similar to folder permissions back then. His scanned test papers still followed the old process: after scanning the OCR, he turned it into text correction questions, the set of extracting text was written before so I won't repeat it again.

memory and drives. two containers each take up 200-300MB of memory, but when I scan the entire Komga database, it consumes 700 to 800MB. My N100 with 8GB of RAM is completely imperceptible, which is even easier than when I installed Navidrome music . The 180GB comic module is a 4TB mechanical drive, not the SSD for downloads—comics are read sequentially, but the mechanical drive can handle it, so don't squeeze into the solid-state space. This storage account is the same as the storage pool I back then.

Also, remember that these two are Docker containers. When upgrading or updating in the future, just follow the five steps upgrading container. Copy the parameters properly, and all the data will be in the mount directory and won't be lost.

pretending to be the right person: take it personally

used it for a month, and my conclusion is that this thing depends on the person:

really want to get started, here's the order: install Calibre on your computer to create an empty library, copy the metadata.db into the NAS directory→ set up the calibre-web container, change the password to start uploading→ start the Komga container, set the port to 25600→ Manga folders arranged according to "one copy per folder, volume number filled→ install an OPDS-compatible reader on your phone→ get your own account for your family. A weekend afternoon session brings you whatever you want to watch in the future—just click and you'll find it.