calibre-mcp

CalibreMCP

📖 Installation Guide — download the .exe from Releases, double-click, done

FastMCP 3.2 MCP server for Calibre e-book library management — AI-assisted search, RAG, and agentic workflows for Sandra's 1000+ book library.

Quick Start

Download Calibre MCP_*_x64-setup.exe from Releases → double-click → launch Calibre MCP. Install guide.

Developers from source:

git clone https://github.com/sandraschi/calibre-mcp
cd calibre-mcp
just sync
just start-webapp

// 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?"

What is this?

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.

Read more

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

Key links

• Documentation hub — curated entry
• Documentation index — full map of ~100 docs
• Tauri desktop — maintainer build and production pitfalls
• 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)

Installation

# 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

Features

• 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.