Chitai - A Self-hosted eBook Management Application
Chitai is a self-hosted ebook management platform I built after outgrowing Calibre-web. The core frustration was simple: I wanted to have separate libraries — my academic textbooks separate from fiction, which meant running two separate instances. That felt wrong and it wasn’t scalable, so I built something with multi-library support from the ground up.
Beyond that, I used it as an opportunity to modernize the experience — built-in EPUB and PDF readers with progress tracking, an OPDS catalog so I can browse and fetch books from my eReader, and native KoSync endpoints so reading progress stays in sync across my KOReader devices.
It was also my first full-stack project at this scale. I picked up Svelte and TypeScript building the frontend, and got much more comfortable with async Python and PostgreSQL on the backend. Every feature is something I actually needed and figured out how to build.
Core features: multiple independent libraries, built-in browser readers, OPDS catalog, KOReader sync, bookshelves, automatic metadata extraction, multi-user support.
More project details, source code, and deployment instructions can be found on here.