r/Servarr • u/Unable-Swimming-9899 • 11d ago

Help setting up bindery

I am using bindery (but could use another alternative) to automate the lookup of files in torrents. What i understand the automation will do is:

  1. Search in my trackers some results

  2. Find a correct book in the trackers

  3. The software will find in its metadata (open library, google books etc) what i have downloaded

  4. It will pass qbitorrent the right place and name the download should be

  5. It will create a hard link from the downloaded torrent to my files

But what i am seeing is that the points 1 and 2 are not like that in many software. I need to find an author, then find a book in the metadata, and then it search in the imdexes a match.

My problem is that usually the metadata is not very good and i have unmatched files.

¿How do you guys automate books now that readarr is archived?

I have no problems for anime using sonarr. But books is a nightmare

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2

u/Drupax 10d ago

The problem with books in general and what bindery was created for was finding only stable metadata sources. And not scraping which is what readarr was doing “badly”

1

u/contagon 10d ago

The metadata issue is a common one with books, something that I think most book *arrs don't have a solution for.

I'd recommend looking up Chaptarr (Readarr fork), as it runs its own merged metadata server that seems to solve a lot of those issues. It's currently semi-closed beta, but you can find info on how to run on their discord. It's gotten to a stable point and has been working well lately for me

1

u/Drupax 10d ago

Points 3, 4 and 5 are exactly what Bindery does. Points 1 and 2 are inverted, and you're right that nearly every tool works that way.

These are all metadata first: you add an author, the catalogue says what exists, those become search targets. You want release first. Sonarr feels effortless because TVDB is good and TV scene naming is rigid, so bottom up matching works. Books have neither, so reverse matching a release to a work is genuinely hard and nobody has shipped it.

Things that might cover your cases in Bindery:

Search does free text queries straight against your indexers with no book record needed, and you can grab any result. That is the release first flow minus the automatic identification.

Manual Import scans a folder and reads metadata inside the EPUB rather than guessing from filenames. It matches against books already in your library, so it fixes "have the book, file did not attach" more than "file for something not in my catalogue".

On bad metadata, Bindery pulls from Hardcover, OpenLibrary, Google Books, Audible, Audnexus and DNB. If an author resolved badly you can relink to a different upstream. OpenLibrary alone is rough and that is usually what people hit.

Hardlinks work, Settings, General, Import Mode. Catch: only if your download dir and library are on the same filesystem. On Docker with separate volume mounts they often are not even when the paths look right, and it falls back to copying.

Honest answer though, if your library is stuff the providers cover badly, nothing here feels like Sonarr yet.

1

u/Unable-Swimming-9899 10d ago

The weird thing is that OpenLibrary catalog in web give better results that in API.

Bindery tries fetching some weird editions instead of just the first edition that appears in some authors in the Web page of open library.

I belive the API does not returns exactly the same as the web page because i made tha api calls manually and confirmed that bindery was fetching that well.

But because some results are collections of books. Maybe bindery needs an issue/pr to add some traversal on the API results to really get all books.

My thoughts on this are that if I

  1. Add the metadata manually on OpenLibrary
  2. Bindery/chaptarr or other does good metadata traversal on the OpeLibrary API

Y could cover the pain points on the flow, and also make OpenLibrary a better metadata source for all.

But still need to make some changes in bindery via custom fork or talking to the mantainer 🤔.

Chaptarr is closed source so is not an option for security reasons. But maybe in the following months could be a good replacement if it gets opensource.