alt Hacker NewsThe last time I was involved in a thread like this, I was banned from r/plex.
I pointed out that Plex should do ebooks. It is a natural fit. They keep track of how far in a series or a show you are, they could keep track of where you are in a book. Many of the Plex idioms transfer well. It has a clear visual style that helps you to pick out the shows you might try, or shows like those you've already watched.
BUT IT'S NOT EVEN MEDIA, YOU'RE STUPID
Books were the first media, you must be illiterate.
WHY WOULD I WANT TO READ BOOKS ON MY BIGSCREEN TV!
Plex runs on my iPhone. And on yours too.
[banhammered]
But if you need more than one feature, I'm sure that in 10 or 15 minutes I could come up with a 90 page list of features. Without even trying.
>I would think the only thing I can think of is fully self-hosted login instead of their cloud option
Well shit. Even you can come up with one thing. Plex was awesome, and then Plex wanted to be the shittiest version of whatever CBS is calling their streaming service.
Replies
Have you checked out Audiobookshelf? Relatively easy to self-host, can do podcasts, audiobooks, ebooks, comics. A few different clients you can use (https://abstoolbox.vito0912.de/clients has some of the more popular ones - Plappa is pretty nice).
An even easier fit would be comic books. They already let you steam libraries of photos. I have never used that feature, but I would definitely stream some comics.
Also, they could handle audiobooks since they already stream music.
Instead, they want to sell me on streaming services when I started using Plex because I pirate my media.
I do see one issue with books that other media doesn't have. That is the ability to interact. When I use my e-reader, I like features like highlighting, taking notes, dictionaries, and other features that are more complicated that just streaming rendered images from a book.
I disagree personally and feel there are better solutions already out there
I was furious when they removed podcasts as they are a fit for the platform and it seems like they just didn't want to maintain them anymore.
I just want to throw out that you might like Kavita for a comic/book server. It's built to feel like Plex. https://www.kavitareader.com/
I do agree that Plex doesn't seem like a good fit for books and comics. The first major hurdle is the lack of a singular metadata source that Plex can hook into for metadata - although this year has shifted with Hardcover and MangaBaka. Plex also uses a filename parsing mechanism (like Kavita does) which has drawbacks since books and comics have an extremely wide variety of naming conventions and lack of good tooling.