Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Welcome to the Lexagonic Librarian. I’m here to help you keep track of, organize, and manage your library—specifically, your collection of digital book files (including audiobooks). My speciality is metadata; the bits of information about your ebooks that helps you know what you’ve actually got and find what you want. I also want to make the process of getting an ebook to your e-reader as simple as possible.

• I’m not trying to be the best ebook reading program you’ve ever met. I can show you what’s inside some of your ebooks (if they’re in the right format), but that’s mostly so you can look at a table of contents or copyright page, rather than being a really seamless reading experience. I don’t have fancy page-turn animations or a font picker, because Apple Books, Kindle, KOReader, and a dozen other apps already do that very well. I’m here to help you keep track of all those lovely ebooks: what you’ve got, and which of what could be a variety of reading devices you want to use to read them.
• I track what you have and where it lives. Every file you import becomes part of a library: searchable, taggable, sortable, and, if you want, automatically kept in sync with whatever’s actually in your Apple Books. Note that Apple’s Books is the one reader program (currently) I can spy on to find out how much you’ve read of a particular book, or if you’ve finished it and deleted it from that app. I don’t currently have means for insight into what’s the situation on your Kindles. Over time, hopefully I’ll be able to have dialogs with other reader programs as well.
• I get files where they need to go. Kindle by email, a USB-connected Kobo, an AirDropped EPUB, a browser download, an OPDS feed for KOReader or Marvin, or uploading to a special Google Drive folder; there’s just one “Read” button for all of that. When you click it, I’ll sort out which options are possible for that particular kind of ebook, and if there’s more than one option, I’ll ask you where you want it to go.
• I try to keep things as simple and intuitive as possible. I do have lots of features, but mostly those features are options. If you want to add a cover to an ebook that came without one, you can. If you want to sort a group of books into the series they belong to, you can. If you have an ebook that’s a collection of short stories, and you’d like to keep track of each story separately, you can. But if you don’t, then you can ignore all of that and just keep your books listed by author and title and call it good.
• I care about industry standards, and not doing things my own special way. I know a lot about how the publishing industry expects metadata to look, and I stick close to that. Even if you want to make up your own hashtags or categories, I’ll record and save them in ways that should be compatible with other programs, and I don’t scramble or encrypt your ebooks into something that only I can read. Someday something better than me might come along to handle your ebooks, and if that day arrives, all the time and effort you might have put into labeling or tracking your collection will be easily imported into that shiny new library.

What I’m good at

• Handling more ebook file types than you’d expect: EPUB (my favorite—it’s the most capable format going, and everything works best there), PDF, MobiPocket, FictionBook, DjVu, plain HTML, and Amazon’s own formats. (If anybody is still using a Rocket eBook, let me know! I’m ready to add support for that, too. )
• Editing metadata—and (with your permission) writing those edits back into the actual ebook file, so a typo fix or an added cover travels with the file wherever it goes next.
• Running wherever you want: a background app on your Mac or PC, or a genuine always-on server for a household library you can access from multiple gizmos.
• Making your library available even when you’re not home, using real encryption to keep your remote connection secure.
• Staying useful at scale—hundreds or thousands of books, not a few dozen.
• Letting an AI assistant help with the tedious parts of organizing a large library— spotting series, drafting descriptions, breaking an anthology into its individual stories, and more. Don’t worry: I make sure you get to double-check any changes before I actually make them. Because, well, you know how AI gets sometimes.
• Supporting the newer ebook readers that interface with the Open Publication Distribution System, aka OPDS. I support both the older Atom-based version and the newer JSON one, so any OPDS reader can browse your library as its own catalog. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, it basically means I support some of the fancy features of many third-party reader/display programs.

What I’m not trying to be

If you’re looking for a place to buy books, or a beautiful place to read them, I’m not it—and I’d rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise. What I want is to be the thing in the middle: the place that knows what you have, in how many editions, on which devices, and how far you’ve gotten—so that the actual reading can happen somewhere better suited to it.

I’m also not here to spy on you. As is often the case, there are ways that I might be able to make your life easier by shipping data off to some system “in the cloud,” but mostly, I keep your data on your computer for you to use. Any time I need to send bytes off to some place else, I’ll let you know, and you’ll have control over that. If you ask an LLM or other AI system to help you, that’s one way data leaves the system, and if I get my cardigan snagged on something and crash, Dave (my programmer) might ask you for a crash report or log file to diagnose the problem. What I won’t do is secret profiling or ongoing monitoring or the like, unless it’s with your explicit permission. Any data-gathering will be clearly marked and definitely “opt-in”, not “opt-out.”