@AsphyxNYC said:
Separate Audio books from the discussion here since they are well within the spectrum of what Plex does, Resuming audio is something that could be done rather easily and effectively…But the concept of Plex is to stream for various devices and make the files compatible…The idea of Comics and Books are not media you would want to stream or transcode…
It works best as a download and read locally…Books take up so little space that it hardly makes sense to keep the books off device. And it’s not like you are going to read a book twice anyway! You download it, Read it then delete it off the device.Even a simple file server would be better suited in that regard.
Calibre works well if you have the right apps for it (Companion and good reader).
It is trickier to set up than Plex for sure but once done pretty much any device can connect, search for and download the book they want It will even convert to the format you want to read it in.Unless you are going in the direction of making Plex a full blown home cloud system I really don’t see where books fit in.
I do understand why some would want this and I sure wouldn’t complain if the Plex Devs decided that’s the way they want to head in…But right now I would rather they perfect the Video and Music playback (and that can include audio books) before they go off on a text and comic only tangent.
Once the video is feature perfect, and have nothing else to do other than codec and transcode updates…Then they can decide to expand their goals to being a cloud service/File Server.
While I agree with much of what you state, Plex already has nearly everything it needs to be a simple eComic viewer. An integrated eBook viewer would be much more difficult to develop, as Plex has no existing systems for viewing the various types of eBooks that are widely used by different kinds of eReaders. But Plex already supports Picture Libraries, and various picture formats, and all eComics are is a bunch of jpg files archived in page order into a Zip or Rar file. And technology to view the insides of an archived Zip or Rar file has been widely available for well over a decade now. So I can see Plex being able to add support for eComics to what they already have in place with a little bit of effort on their part, if they chose to do that. The same is true for Audio books, which they also have many of the needs of that kind of system in place already as well.
I’ve been using Calibre to manage my ever growing eBook library for several years now. But I gave up on their Server portion, as it’s just too clunky to use. I now use Ubooquity as my eBook and eComic server. It uses a simple html interface I can reach using any browser, and is also supported via OPDS in a number of eComic Reader apps. I simply point Ubooquity to my Calibre eBook Library for the book portion of the server, and continue to manage my eBooks using Calibre. My eBooks I currently manage just with Ubooquity, as Calibre kind of sucks with eComics, in my opinion, and I’d rather just manage the eComics myself using Ubooquity, at least until I can locate something better.
