Circulation desk, cataloging workbench, acquisitions office, serials room, and public catalog all share one roof in Koha, an open-source library system that scales across school libraries, branch networks, and consortia. Staff search the catalog with facets for availability, authors, holding libraries, and item types, then open a record to see its cover, subjects, classification numbers, and every copy with its call number, status, and barcode. Catalogers edit MARC 21 or UNIMARC records field by field, copy records in via Z39.50 and SRU searches, and link authorities automatically. At the desk, staff check out, check in, and renew items, work with holds, bookings, and claims, and see overdue warnings and outstanding charges beside each patron. Circulation and fine rules vary by library, patron category, and item type. Acquisitions handles vendors, baskets, budgets, and funds. Serials track subscriptions and issue receiving. A guided report wizard, SQL reports, and statistics wizards summarize circulation and collections. Patrons search the public catalog, place holds, save lists, tag and rate titles, and suggest purchases. Staff tools design notices and slips, print patron cards, set holiday calendars, and import or batch-edit patrons. SIP2 serves self-checkout kiosks, OAI-PMH sets share records, and a REST API exposes patrons, holds, checkouts, and biblios. Lending continues during outages with offline circulation. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

With DSpace, a library or research office can give every thesis, journal article, and dataset its own permanent web address, a searchable metadata record, and files visitors download from the archive. Content sits in a tree of communities and collections, and each collection decides who may deposit and how many review steps follow; reviewers accept a submission or reject it with a note that sends it back to the author. Embargoes hold files back until a set date, access policies limit other files to chosen groups, and sign-in works through LDAP, Shibboleth, SAML, OpenID Connect, or ORCID. Search covers metadata and the extracted full text of uploaded files, facets narrow the results, and browse pages sort by title, issue date, author, or subject. Editors can correct a published item through the submission form. Administrators inspect an audit trail and rewrite homepage news from an admin form. Entity types for people, organizations, projects, journals, and datasets link each publication to the work behind it, and DOIs can be registered through Crossref. Optional settings let authors keep an email address private on their researcher profile and download their own restricted files. Usage reports count visits, downloads, and top countries per item. REST, OAI-PMH, SWORD, and Google Scholar metadata connect the archive to harvesters, deposit tools, and search engines. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. BSD-3-Clause licensed.

Running a school means juggling lesson plans, timetables, attendance, behaviour notes, and grades all at once; Gibbon gives teachers, students, parents, and administrators one shared web system for that daily work. Teachers build lessons from reusable Smart Blocks, assemble them into units with learning outcomes, set and collect homework online, and grade the results in a colour-coded markbook that stays linked to every class. The timetabling engine builds schedules from reusable day structures, ties them to real calendar dates, handles exceptions, books rooms and facilities, and shows every student and teacher exactly where they should be. Attendance can be taken by form group, class, or individual student, with future absences recorded ahead of time and reports ready for emergencies or truancy follow-up. Behaviour records log the good alongside the bad using your school's own descriptors and severity levels, notify form tutors when something needs attention, and surface patterns across a student's history. Each student's profile pulls timetable, attendance, behaviour, library, and assessment information into one page, while activities sign-ups, a school-wide resource library, and departmental scope-and-sequence views keep the wider community connected. Because every module can be switched on or off per role and extended with community modules, the same platform fits a small primary school and a large secondary school in 26 languages. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Human rights teams, legal researchers, and archivists use Uwazi to turn scattered documents and case records into searchable, structured collections that the public or trusted partners can explore online. You design templates that define exactly which fields each record carries, from dates and locations to people, organizations, and document types, then import material through the interface or in bulk from CSV files. Uploaded PDFs and documents become full-text searchable, so a phrase buried inside a scanned report is as findable as the metadata typed beside it. Relationships connect related entities across the collection, letting you trace how a person, an event, and a piece of evidence fit together instead of keeping them in isolated folders. Curators build public pages with live filters, maps, and visualizations drawn directly from collection data, while granular permissions decide which records stay private, which are shared with specific groups, and which are published for everyone. Multi-language support lets the same collection serve readers in several languages, and activity logs keep an audit trail of edits. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Websites such as Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and Stack Overflow pack into single ZIM files, and Kiwix Serve publishes a folder of them as a searchable library that opens in any browser, with no connection to the originals. Point it at individual files, a directory, or a library file, and visitors get a welcome page where they filter books by language, category, or words in the title and description. Each book opens in a built-in viewer without downloading the archive, with toolbar buttons for the library, a random article, and in-book search. Title suggestions appear as you type, and full-text search returns highlighted snippets from indexed books, across several at once when they share a language. OPDS catalogs let reader apps browse and fetch the collection, and the library reloads automatically when its file changes. Admins can swap in a custom welcome page, publish under a URL prefix, hide the library button or search box, block links that leave the archive, and cap connections per visitor. Interface translations cover dozens of languages. Universities, community networks, and home labs get a reference shelf that stays available when the original sites are slow, blocked, or gone, with developer documentation and Q&A always within reach. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

With over 17,700 GitHub stars and continuous development since 2015, Calibre-Web has become the definitive self-hosted digital library solution for book enthusiasts who want beautiful web access to their Calibre collections. The responsive Bootstrap 3 interface delivers instant browsing, searching, and filtering across titles, authors, tags, series, book formats, and languages, with custom shelves for organizing personal reading collections. In-browser reading supports EPUB, PDF, TXT, CBR, CBT, CBZ, and DJVU formats with a configurable EPUB reader featuring multiple themes and page location tracking, while one-click email delivery sends books directly to Kindle, Kobo, and other E-Readers without leaving the interface. Native Kobo sync lets Kobo device owners synchronize their entire Calibre library wirelessly, maintaining reading progress and bookmarks across devices. Metadata management includes editing capabilities with automatic metadata downloading from Google Books, Amazon, and other configurable sources, plus eBook format conversion through Calibre binaries for on-the-fly EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, and PDF conversion. User management provides fine-grained per-user permissions controlling download access, upload rights, editing capabilities, and content visibility based on categories or Custom Column values. Authentication supports local accounts, LDAP directory integration, Google and GitHub OAuth, proxy authentication, and Magic Link login for easy E-Reader access. The OPDS catalog feed enables any compliant E-Reader app to browse and download from the library. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

Serious readers organize, convert, edit, and serve their e-book libraries with Calibre - the definitive open-source e-book manager. This deployment runs the full Calibre desktop application on your server, accessible from any browser, so your library lives in one authoritative place instead of scattered across devices. Its conversion engine is the best in the business, translating between every major format - EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, PDF, DOCX, and dozens more - with fine control over fonts, margins, metadata, and structure detection. Metadata management downloads covers, descriptions, series info, and identifiers from online sources, and every field is editable in bulk. Beyond cataloging, Calibre includes a full e-book editor for EPUB and AZW3 internals, a news engine that fetches newspapers and magazines from the web on schedule and converts them into e-books, book comparison tools, and device syncing that sends the right format to each connected reader. The built-in content server exposes your library over HTTP so phones, tablets, and e-readers can browse and download remotely. A deep plugin ecosystem extends everything - metadata sources, format support, store integrations. For power users, the complete CLI (calibredb, ebook-convert) enables scripted library automation. Your books, your metadata, your server - permanent and DRM-free storage under your control.

Instead of handing your reading history to a retail platform and letting an algorithm decide what you read next, BookWyrm lets a self-hosted community of readers make the recommendations. Shelve every book as to-read, currently reading, stopped, or finished, record start and finish dates with progress updates along the way, and set an annual reading goal to keep the habit honest. Rate and review finished books, drop a comment while you are mid-chapter, or save a quotation worth keeping, and all of it can appear on the book page alongside reviews aggregated from other connected instances. Follow friends to see their shelves fill up, join a group to build a shared reading list, or create your own list and choose whether it stays closed, accepts suggestions for approval, opens to everyone, or belongs to the group. Posts, shelves, and lists each carry their own privacy level, public, unlisted, followers-only, or private, and you can approve followers by hand before they see anything. Because instances federate over ActivityPub, your readers can follow you from another BookWyrm community or straight from Mastodon, and book metadata is shared between servers so small instances do not catalog alone. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Anti-Capitalist Software License licensed.

Shelfarr is the request button your book library was missing: anyone in your household can search millions of ebooks and audiobooks, request the format they want, and let automation fetch and shelve it. Discovery searches Open Library, Hardcover, and Google Books with covers, series, editions, and narrator details, so picking between the ebook and the audiobook takes a glance. Hardcover shelves and public reading lists can be previewed and requested, and following an author means their next release surfaces without a manual search. Requests wait for an admin's approval or move straight to searching, where your indexers are queried and every result is scored against your preferred formats, bitrate, and language. The winning release goes to the download client you route it to; finished files are renamed with your templates and delivered into your library's watched folders, which are told to rescan. Nothing found is not the end: searches retry with back-off and flag the request for attention instead of losing it. Family members get their own accounts with roles, two-factor authentication or single sign-on, notifications in the app or on Discord and Telegram, and admins keep manual uploads, API tokens, and download routing under their control. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. GPL-3.0 licensed.

For avid readers who want to catalog their home bookshelves and track annual reading progress without handing personal habits to commercial social networks, BookLogr delivers a self-hosted personal library and reading tracker that replaces Goodreads and The StoryGraph. Searching by title, ISBN-10, or ISBN-13 pulls book covers, author names, page counts, and descriptions directly from OpenLibrary, while manual entry and user-defined custom fields let you record text, numbers, dates, selections, or boolean attributes for rare and indie editions. Configurable library tabs organize titles across Reading, To Be Read, Already Read, Did Not Finish, and All views with instant author filtering. As you read, you can update your current page number or completion percentage, log start and finish dates across multiple re-reads, and rate completed books on a granular 0.5 to 5.0 star scale. Readers can capture page-linked notes and favorite quotes, keeping reflections private or publishing them to a dedicated Notes and Quotes feed on a shareable public profile. Automated Mastodon integration posts reading milestones to the fediverse, while OpenID Connect single sign-on and single-user mode adapt the workspace for households or solo collectors. Built-in Goodreads CSV import and one-click exports to CSV, JSON, and HTML guarantee complete data portability. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. Apache-2.0 licensed.

Every time a commercial book-tracking platform changes its terms or shuts down, years of reading notes and carefully curated wishlists risk getting lost in messy spreadsheet migrations; Jelu puts your entire reading life under your own control as a self-hosted personal Goodreads alternative. Readers log books as currently reading, finished, or dropped, track page progress and dated reading events, and organize titles across unlimited custom shelves using flexible tags. Adding new books takes seconds through mobile camera ISBN barcode scanning, EPUB and OPF metadata extraction, or automated online searches that query Calibre metadata plugins and fallback book providers for covers, summaries, and publisher identifiers. Migrating existing libraries is effortless with bulk imports for Goodreads CSV exports and plain-text ISBN lists alongside one-click CSV data exports. Author pages automatically pull biographies from Wikipedia and include a deduplication tool to merge duplicate author records created during bulk imports. Household and book-club members can sign in via local accounts, LDAP, or reverse-proxy authentication to share book ratings, write public or instance-wide reviews, inspect yearly and monthly reading statistics, and generate HTML or Markdown embed snippets for personal blogs and digital journals. Running on a dedicated VPS on RepoCloud with guaranteed CPU, RAM, and SSD, full root SSH access, and a browser serial console. MIT licensed.

Most wikis die of flat page-and-tag sprawl; BookStack's defining decision is enforced structure - an MIT-licensed PHP/Laravel platform (over MySQL) where content lives in a hierarchy of shelves, books, chapters, and pages, the way a physical library works. A shelf maps to a department, a book to "Engineering Runbooks," a chapter to "Database Procedures," a page to the actual document. That opinionation removes the "where does this go?" friction and keeps knowledge bases tidy as they grow. Editing works both ways: a clean WYSIWYG editor for most users, a Markdown editor with live preview for those who prefer it - switchable per page. Full-text search spans all books or scopes to one, with direct links to individual paragraphs, and include tags let you embed one page's content inside another so shared blocks update everywhere at once. Every edit creates a diffable, revertible revision. Page templates standardize recurring formats, tags add cross-cutting categorization, and built-in diagrams.net integration draws architecture diagrams in place. Authentication covers email/password plus OIDC, SAML2, LDAP, and social login; a full role and permission system locks content down per shelf, book, or page. Pages and books export to PDF, HTML, plain text, and Markdown, a REST API automates content, and the whole thing runs happily on the cheapest VPS you can find.