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.

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.

calibremcp