Ah, the storage part is interestjnf, I might spin it up to try it, thanks for mentioning it!

Sent :)

I can send you my configs and docker files in pm, if that helps :)

Komga is always mentioned as a good option for this. I use it for books, manga, and comics, but my requirements are quite minimal (koreader sync, opds, and mihon), so it might not work for you exactly.

I do metadata fetching using komf, documentation is a bit lacking but once setup is pretty good (I use it for both manga and comics) and it does everything automatically. There is also a browser extension that provides a UI for it. For comics sometimes I use ComicTagger for manually reviewing tags too. I would just read carefully the folder structure Komga expects if you go with that, to avoid having weird surprises :)

Going a bit against the common suggestions here but my “workflow” is like this:

• I download books through Z-Library, I tried in the past lazylibrarian and readarr/bookshelf, but I always ended up spending a lot of time on refining the search for non-english books, which was just way easier in Z-Library.
• I tag/update metadata of books using Calibre of my laptop. I prefer to manually do that because while it took a few days to do it for my whole library, I don’t really add books in such a high number that I can justify automating it or having a Calibre container on my homeserver. (I know Calibre Web Automated will do this, but see below). I use Hardcover to track my readings, so Calibre with the hardcover plugin makes it easy to find ids or HC editions for integrations with other apps I use.
• After moving between Kavita, CWA and Booklore, I set up on Komga for library management. I found Komga’s koreader sync way more stable and mature than the other options. I am a bit annoyed by the fact that (as in Kavita) each book/series folder is a series, but at the end of the day the pros outweighs the cons for me. I can manage custom reading lists or series, so it’s not really an issue personally.

Also Komga works pretty well with Koreader. I moved my books from Kavita to Komga and I found it to be more reliable regarding the two-way syncing progress (at least for me).

I generally don’t update automatically, I currently use WUD. It works fine for image checking and notifications and had no need to change it for now, but I am thinking of trying dockhand too.