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Bookshelf serves self-hosted EPUB and PDF libraries from Cloudflare R2 or local disk
Bookshelf is a self-hosted eBook library that runs as a Cloudflare Worker over R2 object storage or as a Node server over a filesystem directory, with in-browser readers for EPUB and PDF and no database dependency.
For engineers who want a personal ebook library without standing up a database, Bookshelf offers a narrow deployment surface using either object storage or local disk. It ships with no authentication, so any public exposure requires a reverse proxy or a trusted network, and the sync tool does not support Windows.
Written by elseif from the cluster below · every claim links back to a sourceThe three things worth knowing
Bookshelf runs as a Cloudflare Worker over R2 or a Node server over a filesystem directory, with no database.
The sync tool requires Node 24 or newer on a Unix-like system; Docker ships the needed cwebp and pdftoppm image tools.
There is no authentication, and a read-only mode is enforced at the storage layer for public-facing instances.
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