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calibre-mcp MCP Server

Calibre ebook library server: search, read content, curate metadata, semantic search, gated writes.

Publisher claimed. No tool list reported, and Pod has not connected to this server.

Status

Pod has not dialled calibre-mcp yet, so everything on this page is what its publisher reported rather than what we observed. Registries describe servers; they do not connect to them. Until a check runs, treat the tool list below as a claim.

Connect

Published as calibre-mcp on npm. Runs locally.

Known issues

87 problems reported by people outside the maintainer team. Issues filed by the project's own owners, members and collaborators are excluded — those are release checklists and internal refactors, not things that will go wrong for you. Showing 12.

Most discussed

Probe: ImageContent rendering + payload caps in Claude Desktop

Question

HITL probe on Artem's Desktop via a dev .mcpb (mcpb-dev skill): do figure ImageContent blocks render in chat? Does the model demonstrably SEE them (ask it to describe a diagram)? Where does Desktop actually choke on payload size (validate the ~2 MB cap; find the real ceiling)? Does detail:high visibly improve label readability on a dense diagram? Record facts like spike #21 did. Done = verdict comment + any cap adjustments filed against the tool.

Read the thread · 2026-07-22 · closed · 7 comments

feat: figures widget — fetch mirror per approved mockup

Question

Implement the widget: new src/ui/figures-html.ts built from the frozen v2 mockup (docs/dev/design/figures-widget-v2.html — reading pane + margin rail, #114; the v1 contact sheet in #110 is superseded), registered as a ui:// app resource and attached to calibre_get_figures via _meta.ui.resourceUri.

Wire the MCP plumbing into the v2 mockup, don't redesign it. The mockup leaves four seams (figures-widget-v2.html:191): window.FIG.render(payload), `onToggleZoom(idx

Read the thread · 2026-07-27 · closed · 4 comments

get_content and content-layer tools fail after client restart while ping succeeds; missing @huggingface/transformers breaks more than semantic search

Summary

After a Claude Desktop restart, content-related tools consistently fail with a generic tool execution error, while calibre_ping succeeds. Metadata and content tools (calibre_get_content, calibre_search mode=fts, calibre_get_book) all return errors on every call.

Environment

  • Client: Claude Desktop (macOS)
  • Library: Programming_Books (~800 books), Calibre GUI + Content Server running on :8080
  • Book used for repro: id 164, PDF (Software Architecture Metrics, OReilly)

Repro /

Read the thread · 2026-07-21 · closed · 3 comments

Search-inside buttons vanish after a successful click — ui/message success misread as failure

What happened

In Claude Desktop (v0.6.0), clicking Search inside on the cover board sends the message to chat correctly (the assistant starts searching inside the book) — but afterwards the Search-inside affordance disappears from every card in the widget, in both the shelf and coverflow variants. Re-entering the chat restores them.

What I expected

A successful click leaves the buttons in place. The message-backed buttons should only hide when the host genuinely can't deliver ch

Read the thread · 2026-07-21 · closed · 3 comments

Clicked Read button disappears from the book card after use (Claude Desktop)

What happened

In Claude Desktop (v0.6.0 bundle), clicking a per-format Read button (e.g. Read PDF) on the book card opens Desktop's open-link confirmation dialog — and the clicked button disappears from the card. It happens regardless of whether the dialog is approved (book opens in the browser) or dismissed. Only the clicked button vanishes; the other format's Read/⬇ pair and the rest of the card stay. Leaving and re-entering the chat restores the button.

What I expected

The button

Read the thread · 2026-07-21 · closed · 3 comments

Most recent

Expose index generation (INDEX_VERSION) as citation provenance in semantic-search results + calibre_ping

Problem

calibre_semantic_search returns locations (bookId, format, charStart/charEnd, and page for figure hits) that are only meaningful relative to the extraction + chunker generation that produced the index. That generation is tracked internally as INDEX_VERSION (src/semantic/model.ts:147) and written into the index meta table alongside model_id/dim (src/semantic/store.ts:808), but it is not exposed anywhere a client can read:

  • not in `calibre_semantic_search

Read the thread · 2026-08-27 · open · 0 comments

feat(structure): EPUB TOC (nav.xhtml/NCX) as a chapter-map source — needs spine-aware extraction

Problem

An EPUB carries the best chapter structure of any format we handle — an explicit, authored nav.xhtml (EPUB 3) or NCX (EPUB 2) table of contents, with real titles pointing at real spine documents. We use none of it. Chapter detection (src/domain/structure/chapters.ts) runs the same text heuristics over an EPUB as over a scanned PDF, so a book whose TOC says "The Carpet-Bag" only gets a chapter span if that string happens to look like a heading in the converted plain text.

Read the thread · 2026-08-21 · open · 0 comments

feat(structure): use the PDF outline (bookmarks) as a chapter-map source

Problem

Chapter detection (src/domain/structure/chapters.ts) is purely text-based: explicit headings (Chapter 5 / Kapitel 5 / Глава 5 / 第5章), Roman numerals, or Markdown #/##. A PDF that carries a perfectly good publisher outline (bookmarks) but never writes the word "Chapter" in its body text comes back detector: "none" — no chapter map for calibre_get_content mode=structure, no chapter walk for calibre-distill, and search hits labelled by raw offset instead of a cha

Read the thread · 2026-08-21 · open · 0 comments

feat(extract): support ODT books (ebook-convert already handles them)

FORMAT_PREFERENCE in src/calibre/extract.ts currently ends at … docx, htmlz, fb2, rtf — odt is missing, so a book whose only format is ODT is reported as "no extractable text format" by calibre_get_content, calibre_build_index and ISBN scanning, exactly like the md gap fixed in #131 / v0.7.4.

ODT is a first-class input format for Calibre's ebook-convert (the same backend that already handles EPUB/MD/DOCX here), so this should be a one-line addition plus a test — no new

Read the thread · 2026-08-21 · open · 0 comments

ui: clicking a cover on the cover board does nothing visible in Claude Desktop (widget-initiated tools/call result never reaches the chat)

Symptom (Claude Desktop, live, 2026-08-18)

On the cover board (both shelf and coverflow), clicking a cover — the centered one in coverflow — shows the "Opening…" overlay for ~1.4 s and then nothing happens. No book card appears in the chat.

Reproduced while recording the new demo GIF: which of my books explain consumer-group rebalancing? → coverflow → click centered cover → nothing.

Cause

src/ui/board-html.ts onCardClick(bookId) does a widget-initiated `tools/call calibre

Read the thread · 2026-08-18 · closed · 1 comment

Task: seed initial bundles + exclusion markers for Artem's library (curation session)

Question

Run the first curation session over the real library (791 books): decide and create the initial topic bundles (e.g. rust, databases, architecture, ai/llm — drive from calibre_list_categories tag counts and calibre_quality_report) and the first - exclusion markers (noise/outdated books). HITL: bundle boundaries and what counts as noise are Artem's calls; the agent proposes from tag statistics, Artem confirms, calibre_manage_bundles writes. Done = a confirmed starter set live

Read the thread · 2026-08-03 · open · 0 comments

Release: v2-based calibre-mcp ships + Desktop verification on the released bundle

Question

Ship it and prove it live.

Cut the release via the release agent (version shape decided at this point, per the map's Not yet specified): version bump across all spots including manifest.json and .claude-plugin/plugin.json, CHANGELOG entry, tag, CI publish; then verify npm + .mcpb + MCP Registry isLatest.

Then verify live in Claude Desktop on the released bundle, not a dev one:

  • server connects and all 18 tools are listed;
  • a read round-trips (`calibre_search

Read the thread · 2026-07-28 · open · 0 comments

See all 24 reports Pod holds for calibre-mcp — of 87 qualified upstream.

Firsthand observations

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