I love it in principle but, considering how small most books are relatively to storage space offered by modern devices, even mobile ones, what is the upside of storing content centrally instead of just carrying a copy with you?
Many of my ebooks are anywhere from 50 to 350 Mb. That adds up when you want to load many of them. The downside of course is that you need a good Net connection, unless the Calibre Content Server can be configured to do some kind of 'trimming', while serving the ebooks over the wire.
Also a content server mitigates you having to manage and synchronise your ebooks in multiple places. You only need to manage one library. Although I guess any sync application can work just as well for this.
They contain a lot of colour images and diagrams. Books on biology and art. Granted other topics including fiction are usually in the ballpark of a few megabytes.
Yeah, I get that this is what they're aiming for but home server with Plex is justified by the massive size a video and even music collections can reach.
Plex can also transcode, which is more important if your video is on a bunch of different formats that might not have hardware support on all your devices.
I think a lot more people share their music and video collections than their book collections despite the file size differences. Maybe it's because there isn't a book-Plex?
Maybe it's because music and video can be easily consumed during the duration of a visit, whereas books take much longer? "Check out what I have on the server" makes sense for music and much less sense for books.
I use raspis to host a local calibre service to share collaborative materials and resources in office, at home to share media with guests ("hey, take a look at this magazine article/graphic novel/campaign"), and for when I want to make available format shifted content and documents through libreoffice headless (not everyone wants pdf/mobi/docx/etc).
I can also throw up another instance to serve to specific groups, like relatives or kids, so they can download and network print deemed safe content like crosswords or recipes.
You can probably see why I wouldn't want that on my phone all at once.
You still need to remember to sync your new books to your local device at some point. This lets you do it anywhere/anytime, thus avoiding the scenario of leaving for holiday and forgetting entirely.
I used to COPS on my nas. I would add books using calibre, stored on the nas, and served up via COPS. Many apps (I used FBReader) have OPDS capabilities. This is a sort of online catalog which your reader can browse, search, and download books from. I almost never used the online reading feature, but did utilize the catalog concept quite a bit, especially when switching devices. I had a rooted Nook that had both FBReader and Kindle reader installed, giving me a sort of "best of three worlds" reader. I did have to "page sync" manually. I would do this by memorizing a sentence or phrase on one device and then search for it on the other device.
I have 11gb of books and less than 11gb free on my device. Although I don't use the content server I do use calibre companion to wirelessly connect and sync select books based on author or tag. Even if I were syncing the entire library calibre is a nice way to manage metadata and sync and calibre companion is a nice search interface.
Also a single central location + backup ensures that your books are unlikely to be lost.
