📖 Installation Guide — quick start, manual setup, and troubleshooting
FastMCP 3.2 MCP server for Calibre e-book library management — AI-assisted search, RAG, and agentic workflows for Sandra's 1000+ book library.
git clone https://github.com/sandraschi/calibre-mcp
cd calibre-mcp
justThis opens an interactive dashboard showing all available commands. Run just bootstrap to install dependencies, then just serve or just dev to start.
If you don't have just installed:
// claude_desktop_config.json
{
"mcpServers": {
"calibre-mcp": {
"command": "uv",
"args": ["run", "calibre-mcp"],
"env": {
"CALIBRE_LIBRARY_PATH": "L:/Multimedia Files/Written Word/Calibre-Bibliothek"
}
}
}
}
Then ask Claude: "Find unread sci-fi books", "Open a random Banks novel", or "What's my library health?"
calibre-mcp bridges your Calibre e-book library and AI assistants (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.) via the Model Context Protocol. It reads Calibre's metadata.db directly, indexes metadata for semantic search (LanceDB RAG), and exposes 21 portmanteau tools for natural-language library management.
| Topic | Description |
|---|---|
| About Calibre | What Calibre is, how it stores data, access methods |
| About Calibre Web | calibre-web vs Calibre Content Server, running both together |
| About Plugins | CalibreMCP Integration plugin, calibreops-bridge, roadmap |
| About MCP Tools | 21 portmanteau tools, architecture, agentic flows |
| About AI Workflows | RAG, FTS, skills, prompts, sampling, agentic chaining |
- Documentation index — full map of ~100 docs
- Cookbook — goal-oriented recipes
- API reference — all MCP tools and endpoints
- Configuration — env vars and library setup
- Troubleshooting — common issues and fixes
- Webapp README — Next.js dashboard on ports 10720/10721
- Plugin README — Calibre GUI plugin install and usage
- Plugin repo — calibreops-bridge (RAG/AI plugin)
# Development install
git clone https://github.com/sandraschi/calibre-mcp.git
cd calibre-mcp
uv sync
# Or via MCPB package
npx mcpb install calibre-mcp- FastMCP 3.2 — Universal connect (stdio + HTTP), sampling, agentic tool chaining
- 21 portmanteau tools — Consolidated operations (search, manage, export, OCR, viewer)
- Metadata RAG (LanceDB) — Semantic search over title, authors, tags, comments
- Full-text chunk RAG — FTS-driven book content retrieval
- Calibre FTS — Phrase search with PDF page / EPUB spine locations
- Calibre plugin — Extended metadata editor + VL from query in Calibre GUI
- Webapp — Next.js dashboard with AI chat, Semantic Search, Skills, Smart Import
- Skills & prompts — Reusable agentic workflows (recommendations, library health, etc.)
- Concurrency-safe — Thread-safe DB operations for multi-client access
- Windows-native — Unicode-safe, runs reliably on Windows
Austrian efficiency for digital libraries. Built with realistic AI-assisted development timelines.