I tried to avoid Calibre for as long as I could. In my opinion, it’s way too opinionated about how everything is organized. Instead of working with you, the user, it forces you into line with how the developer thinks it should work. The developer is also kind of an ass to his community and, as a dev myself, I have some concerns over some of their choices.

All that said, I finally gave in recently and converted to Calibre because there’s nothing else that works as well. It’s too niche of a space for there to be much competition. To use it remotely - or, more accurately for my use, headless - the docker image I use sets up a VNC viewer to work with the application.

For actually browsing the content that Calibre organizes, I settled on Kavita. There’s no competition for Calibre’s organization but Kavita is easily the best content browser I’ve tried. If you’ve organized and tagged your ebooks with Calibre, it does a great job of making them available on the web and offers an OPDS server as well as the web viewer. I am more into ebooks than comics or manga but I have a few that Kavita also manages well.

I’d like to hear some alternatives too. Calibre is fine but it’s pajeetware.

Try audiobookshelf I use it for both audiobooks and ebooks. It has a best user management and has also mobile apps

I’ve just been down this exact journey, and ended up settling on Kavita. It has all the browse, search and library stuff you’d expect. You can download or read things in the web interface. I’m only using it for epub and PDF books, but its focus is comics and manga so I expect it to shine there.

I don’t think it does mobi, but since I use Calibre on my laptop to neaten up covers and metadata before I drop books on to the server it’s a simple matter to convert the odd mobi I end up with. Installation (using docker inside an LXC) was simple.

It’s been a really straightforward, good experience. Highly recommend. I like it better than AudioBookshelf (which I’m already hosting for audio books) which I also tried, but didn’t like as much for inexplicable reasons. I also considered Calibre-Web, but that seemed a bit messy since I guess I’d use Calibre on my laptop to manage my books on a NAS share then serve it headless from the server with Calibre-Web? I might have that completely wrong, I didn’t spend any time looking into it because Kavita was the second thing I tried and it did exactly what I wanted.

Calibre over Guacamole, Calibreweb, with Openbooks for usenet searching of books.

---
version: "2.1"
services:
  calibre:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre:latest
    container_name: calibre
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=America/Denver
    security_opt:
      - seccomp=unconfined
    volumes:
      - ./data:/config
    ports:
      - 7080:8080
      - 7081:8081
    restart: unless-stopped
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true

  calibre-web:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/calibre-web:latest
    container_name: calibre-web
    environment:
      - PUID=0
      - PGID=0
      - TZ=America/Denver
      - DOCKER_MODS=linuxserver/mods:universal-calibre #optional
    volumes:
      - ./data/web-config:/config
      - ./data/:/books
#      - ./data/Calibre\ Library:/books
    ports:
      - 7083:8083
    restart: unless-stopped
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true

  openbooks:
    ports:
      - 7082:80
    volumes:
      - './data/:/books'
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: calibre-openbooks
#    command: --persist
    command: --name fgddfghjasrtrtcgv --persist
    environment:
      - BASE_PATH=/
    image: evanbuss/openbooks:latest
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.enable=true