A reading system for a social media addicts
2023-04-10
I am but two things: a dedicated student who wants to read everything he can get his hands on, and a social media junkie.
This post will specify how I used my newly gained interests in self-hosting to help me read more as a social media addict who can't stop scrolling on his phone.
Table of Contents
The idea
Scrolling. Scrolling is the key to get me off from social media to reading books. Since social media have made me develop the habit of scrolling non-stop for hours, a corresponding system where books that can be read though non-stop scolling can be used to displace social media. It's like nicotine addict using vaping as a subsititue for cigarettes.
The system
The main component of this system uses Kavita, an open source library service.
On top of that you also need a place to get books. My favorite is libgen, and a tool to input the books.
Now depending on where you hosts you Kavita, the method of putting in book into your virtual library will be different. Since i wanted to avoid the hassel of renting a server of my own, I used pikapods, a great platform for hosting a variety of open source services.
If you hosting it on your own machine, you will need to download the installer from their website, and you should be able to access a version of Kavita on your local machine on http://localhost:5000.
If you decided to use pikapods, you can first try it out by register a free account. They'll gift you a 5 dollars coupon upon new registration. Just search Kavita in this page and click the run your own button, then follow the instructions to create a new pod. The defualt server configuration should be enough Kavita's need.
Pikapods also allows sftp file tranfer. So get to a terminal on you machine or download a ftp app on you phone to login to the server. You identification should be specified in the settings of the server under Files
Epub, never pdf
This is a key point in this system. Always prioritize Epub over pdf. Becuase Epub allows the text to be formated to one chapter per page. So you can scroll as much as you want when reading the book. Pdf will have too many pages. Too many pages means too many page breaks, which means too many distractions.
PDFs are also large, which can be expensive to store. Epub often comes with smaller sizes
The flow
- Get hold of a name of the book
- Search on sites like Libgen, and download the book (perferably epub, if not pdf)
- upload to server through various means
- Scan library through Kavita and get the new books
Some things to note
Here are the file structure guides and naming convension