Want a better approach to manage my offline books library

Knowledge management
1

I wanted to manage my library of books and articles or anything else which a library can consists of like audio books, podcasts, etc which are stored on my pc in one or many folders. My requirement are :

  • I want to see all the books as cards, the image of the card coming from the first page of the pdf link I have pasted and the name of the card will be the name I have added. (So for this, I can create a file, where I will add name of the book and on the next line there will be the link of the pdf, or podcast, etc). For example :

Unread_Bookds.md

### 1. The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
**Link :** [[Link of pdf]]
**Summary or Annotations :** [[Summary-The-Compound-Effect-By-darren-Hardy]]

### 2. The Magic of Thinking Big by David J Schwartz
**Link :** [[Link of pdf]]
**Summary or Annotations :** [[Summary-The Magic of Thinking Big]]

  • Similar to the above file, there will be other markdown files, where I will add unread articles, audiobooks, podcast etc. So that I will only able to see the unread books in the view as cards.

  • Also, once I click on the card it will open the corresponding Summary or Annotations file.

I would like to know, if there is any template or plugin to manage my library efficient, I have came across, many but I believe I will find ideas from you guys much better then those templates.

I am also open to learn your approaches for organizing your libraries and how to you guys make your libraries look better, record the progress of your book reading, schedule reading, etc.

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2

I have used a program called Calibre for years which does exactly what you are requiring.

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3

Hey! Thank you for mentioning that. Actually heard about it sometime back, but will surely check it out now.

Also, there is a plugin called Calibre to import the data from Calibre software to Obsidian, so might help me with that.

But open to listen suggestions from others, on how they manage their books and audiobooks library.

5

That sounds interesting as well. But Sometimes there is also a need that, we create bookmarks and highlights, and then we can link those highlights to notes. At present, I am trying to see how can I use both the software together to make the best use of both and organize my offline books properly. I donot want to delete my books, so linking notes to different parts of the books is one of the great way to read books and get most out of them and there are plugins, using which we can easily do that right now. Only I wished, there was a complete Calibre inside Obsidian through some plugin to see all the books as library, see their progress and all.

6

I also wanted the following thing to achieve, instead of creating a new topic, let me ask this here itself :

How to use PDF books as audiobooks

I had used only the Reader by ElevenLabs to read my PDF (or other formats) books I have locally on my system for a some time now. For reading Web Articles, I use extensions like NaturalReader. But I actually enjoy reading books from my Windows PC and was searching for a desktop application for the same. I liked the way Reader by ElevenLabs works, but it has few downsides which I don’t like, such as, Eleven labs don’t work without internet, it uploads my PDFs in their cloud.

To give a summary of what I want in the application are :

  • The application interface should be similar to Xodo. I am not looking for any editing feature for the PDF and all, the only reason I mention Xodo was because, it has the features like showing all the books in a nice gallery format with thumbnail, it shows progress of the book how much I have read and I can surf through a specific folder to see all the PDF or other format books I have offline on my PC. Xodo has a speed reader feature, but for that I am required to select the text I want to read, and also it lacks features such as auto-scrolling, highlighting the words while reading, etc. These are the reasons I am searching for a different desktop application.
  • The reader should have functionalities similar to Reader by ElevenLabs android app. That is, all the control buttons, I should be able to pause and come back to the application and continue from the last checkpoint.
  • The application should allow me to use the TTS voice engine from my pc instead of using an online service, so the app should work in offline mode.
  • Along with other features like controlling the speech speed, auto scrolling, highlighting the text while reading, etc.

Would love to know if there is already a desktop application like this (otherwise, I guess I will have to start building my own plugin inside Obsidian, which will take some time.)

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7

After exploring for a while with different softwares and workflows in Obsidian, I couldn’t able to find what I exactly wanted. Hence, decided to proceed with developing my own plugin. I can foresee the exact completion of this plugin to give the essential feature, but will update on the same once I publish it.

Here is the link to my repo for the plugin development : Library - plugin for Obsidian

Feel free to join the development or contribute by suggesting features and improvement for the plugin.

8

Hi, almost everything you mentioned is possible in Calibre. Voice reading, note taking and highlighting within the Calibre viewer, exporting to Obsidian using a Calibre plugin, etc. I have been using it for years and it is very versatile. The learning curve is high, but lower than Obsidian. There are several tutorials on their website. I manage 30,000 books and papers and it works very smoothly on a normal PC.

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