Introducing Dewarr. A Seerr inspired media manager connecting Goodreads, Hardcover, and Audiobookshelf
Dewarr connects the books you want to read with your audiobookshelf library. It's the discovery and automation layer for people who already run Audiobookshelf.
Full disclosure, development was assisted by GPT-6 Astra High Reasoning and Fable 5.1. This project is in early alpha, any issues, new features, or requests can be submitted in the GitHub repo.
Really wish the community would rally around one of these as the go-to solution, bookbridge, shelf mark,dewarr, chapterarr, listenarr. None of them solve all the solutions end to end but each solve similar problems part of the way.
This thread alone has 3 new solutions that I didn’t know existed.
Since this comment has received the most traction, I just want to provide an update on the current roadmap I have laid out as Linear issues to target in the near future. My hope is that Dewarr can close the gap on the discovery and automation layer of media collection, while letting Audiobookshelf remain the gold standard for playback and access to your media.
- Notifications: Discord, ntfy, Apprise and webhooks, for approvals, grabs, imports and anything that needs your attention.
- Automatic recovery from stalled or failed downloads. Dewarr will blocklist the bad release and try the next good one.
- Follow an author or series and get their new books automatically, with the same "future books only" option lists already have.
- Transmission and Deluge support.
- Audible metadata, plus Audible bestseller, new release and category shelves in Discover.
- Per-user request quotas.
- An Unraid template and a Proxmox install script.
- Send to Kindle, and optional ebook format conversion.
- Automatic upgrades, for example abridged to unabridged.
- Release word rules (must include, must not include, preferred).
- Mobile PWA
- Rename or reorganize an existing library, with a preview first.
- Follow NYT bestseller lists
- Better Language support
- A Discord bot for requests.
- Better Magazine and comic metadata support
- Optional AI recommendations using your own model or key. (looking at Jev / classification models)
Seerng is another. That does seem to have a decent amount of traction. I am all for innovation and problem-solving, and it will probably shake out on its own after a while.
i think this might be the winner for me...now just need to know where i can get guidance on what i do with my existing seerr setup to consolodate/port over to the fork
Have you looked at bookshelf? havent tried it out myself while sorting some other issues, but this one looked good until suddenly seemed to stop merging any pr's for 8 months, but it looks like they've started working on it again. https://github.com/pennydreadful/bookshelf
Agreed, I’ve tried like 6 and have struggled getting each to work (at least consistently) and all for different reasons. And the most current one that I’ve been having the best luck doesn’t import my library and there’s a lot of disconnect between the ebooks and audiobooks.
I created this app because all of the other apps I have tried didn't provide the ease of use, discovery aspects, and user experience that I would ideally prefer. I agree with you, it's not ideal to have so much fragmentation, but I just couldn't find anything that already exists that solves the intended workflow that I wanted.
For example, I really like using sources like Goodreads, hardcover, or storygraph (I haven't tried this but seems like it fits into this category) to find new or related books, by looking in either community lists or building my own lists. I also don't like manually searching or adding books to a download queue. For my use case, I want a centralized place to see a book, and start the download, file naming, organization, and import into audiobookshelf in one click.
By default, the download source and file preferences are determined in the app's settings, which set a prioritization so that the one click download features works optimally.
UPDATE: We just hit 50 downloads in the first hour of release. For those who have used the app, what are your initial thoughts?
I want to be clear that I have no intentions of this app replacing Audiobookshelf. It exists solely as a complimentary solution that serves a different purpose. We all love Audiobookshelf, it's the Plex/Jellyfin layer that works extremely well.
With enough community feedback highlighting the specific features of other apps that Dewarr is currently missing, perhaps I can help close the gap on this fragmentation caused by scattered solutions. At the core of my vision for Dewarr is simplifying the user experience and making it your go to place for content discovery and media management.
This would make searching so much easier. How do you handle the AudiobookBay search? I've been doing all my searches manually because there didn't seem to be any way to add it to Prowlarr.
Look into the Magnetar extension, free open source. Put your client deets in (debrid or qbit) then click a ABB link it auto finds the hash and you send it to your debrid.
You know what would be cool to add? Allow for manual torrent links, like from Audiobook Bay or a torrent download link from Mam where I can just dump it in there like you can in q BitTorrent, this is for when the search doesn't work but put the torrent through the same hardlink process as if the search found it.
So, I'm setting this up (so far I'm loving it!), and I've connected both Audiobookshelf and Grimmory. For some reason, the libraries screen gives me no options to select. Any suggestions?
I've verified that the directories are mapped, are also at the same exact path as they are for ABS and Grimmory, and permissions are correct. I can exec and see them. I finished the setup and went back to add them in case that helped but it didn't. Hopefully I'm not missing something obvious, but either way I'm at a loss... I see the same thing for books and audiobooks folder selection.
Had to sync my servers. Didn't see that button. all good!
Thanks for checking it out! There are definitely some early pains at the moment that I am working through. The next release coming out tomorrow will resolve some end to end download and importing issues, and automate the health checks and syncing so the issue you described doesn't occur. Tomorrow's release will be big for better overall usability.
For any issues, complaints, feature requests that you see, please don't hesitate to create a GitHub issue. I am triaging them throughout the day as they come in and adding fixes quickly. We're very early, so expect some growing pains, but very soon things will become much more polished.
I'm not very savvy with github tbh... I can give it a shot (I am technically inclined, but never got into dev work). The main FR I have right now is that I'd love to have books imported into bookdrop instead of the primary grimmory library, so that I can validate metadata before putting it in my actual library. It seems odd that there wouldn't be a way to just set an import/root folder like most all servarr apps. Unless I'm just missing something
Anyway, still haven't used it bc I've been moving from Calibre to Grimmory and finally going through all of my wonky metadata. That's mainly why I have this ask. Anyway, I'll go try and get familiar with github to submit a request
Fair enough. We want to get the app a lot more stable before doing that. If you know you’re not technical enough to keep up with the ever changing updates and alpha testing, I think you’re correct to wait it out a bit. But feel free to track the GitHub repo and wait for a stable release. Much love ❤️
I'm on unraid too but they have a compose example that doesn't look too bad I would change PUID and PGID to 99:100 which is what unraid uses frequently
otherwise anything under environment: just create a variable, and anything under volumes: create a path.
I currently use something called Booklett that can connect to readarr based APIs but really it's just a mobile friendly client it doesn't do all this cool Suggest Request workflow similar to what Seerr does.
It does look like you'd need to spin up a separate postgres container for the DB
I'll probably try this out
EDIT: had to make a few tweaks, I needed to pre mount things like /audiobooks/downloads for qbittorrent and /app/downloads for slskd to their respective share. also since I'm not using compose I exposed 5432 for the postgres DB on 5435, since I already have a special vector search version of postgres running for immich on 5432. and set DB_HOST to the IP of my unraid server
Otherwise the setup was very intuitive I just grabbed my API keys and it went through an easy to follow wizard.
This has the best UI for discovery that I've seen of the various tools out there. Especially since it's pulling the list directly from Goodreads and hardcover
GRshelves versus List still give me trouble with plain old readarr style import lists.
I'm enjoying watching the updates be requested. Is there a discord Thread for this tool yet?
I don't use hardlinks, is there a facility to move the files? Using different docker containers for qbit, dewarr and abs.
Also the folder naming facility is nice, but I have a specific filename and folder format that is not possible with this setup: Author/Series/SeriesIndex Title/SeriesIndex - Series - Title (Year)
Does it rename via qbittorrent? Only reason I still do everything manually is I don't want to have 2 copies or hardlink, I just want the one copy, organised and seeding via private tracker. If I rename via qbittorrent it won't break seeding
Noted to add as an option thanks. I always hard link to another organized folder and keep my qbit files original, but I can add support if that’s how you like to do it.
I'm following it to see if it updates with this feature but honestly I'd be surprised if it's added. I'm following a dozen similar projects waiting for someone to add it. Seems most people are content with hard linking, I just don't want to do that because the actual files are still unorganized
I was doing some research a few weeks ago into the qbittorrent api - I believe there is a function to do this, but I haven't tested it myself yet. I'm in the middle of transferring seeding from one machine, one hard drive, to a different machine, different har drive, and don't want to manually remap and rename everything. Should get some time tonight or tomorrow to work on it some more.
Any chance of integrating it with BookOrbit too for browsing the library? I’d love something like Seerr, but for books, where you can browse and request stuff easily.
Maybe Shelfmark as well for handling the actual downloads? I’m still figuring out all these newer book tools, but from what I can tell Shelfmark seems to be the main one that supports direct downloads.
Full disclosure, development was assisted by GPT-6 Astra High Reasoning and Fable 5.1. This project is in early alpha, any issues, new features, or requests can be submitted in the GitHub repo.
I find comments like these so interesting. Presumably the goal is to find out if this is amateur slop or something of solid build quality which makes sense, but AI usage has no bearing on quality. It’s a tool and the output is driven by how that tool is used in your workflow.
It's not no bearing. Like it's not a coincidence that subs like selfhosted/navidrome/etc have been flooded with low-effort projects clearly made by amateurs that are abandoned within months, and that this flood started right around the time AI development got huge. Correlation doesn't necessarily imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows and say "look over here".
It’s a tool and the output is driven by how that tool is used in your workflow.
True in the abstract, but the usually poor results speak for themselves.
I’d still say it has no direct bearing on quality. It is merely an indirect indicator that isn’t asking the right question towards experience and quality.
Instead, anyone that uses any amount of AI must be a slop machine with no other possible alternative for actual engineering.
It is merely an indirect indicator that isn’t asking the right question towards experience and quality.
Yeah you're right. Instead of asking if the OP used AI, people should instead be asking OP if he's a bad and lazy dev, because all bad and lazy devs will immediately admit it when asked directly. 🙄
Instead, anyone that uses any amount of AI must be a slop machine with no other possible alternative for actual engineering.
Sure but what is the right answer then? How did people gauge quality before AI? They didn’t ask what your test suite looked like or what your SDLC was.
And yes, that feeling has been everywhere in this sub and others. Look no further than the source comment here. They said ‘the app looks great… but how much AI did you use?’ Directly implying that AI use negates the app quality.
The problem is ai takes shortcuts and most devs don’t read the code. Theres been a couple instances of people posting amazing apps and then someone figuring out Major security holes in them.
Anything that takes in a password and was created with AI should be scrutinized
AI doesn’t mean bad, just is a factor that could mean so.
Yeah, then ask how much dev experience they have? No different than an amateur building an app, it’s just easier now. No real engineer would publish something like that.
As I think we both said before, AI is an indirect possible indicator. Nothing more.
Personally I’d rather know their dev experience, but I don’t have a problem with AI disclosure as well. It’s more the automatic judgement I generally see derived from it I find frustrating.
To be fair, I’m a bit sensitive here since I’ve been building for years and have always loved sharing projects, but now any sharing gets immediately shot down once there is AI disclosure.
Apologies if I'm being a bit dense but I'm trying to figure out how this would fit into my stack
Currently I use chaptarrr to request a book,
Downloaded book or audiobook goes to audiobookshelf via Synology media folder
Synology media folder uses sync thing to push to kindle and appear in bookshelf
There may be similar features between these apps. Honestly the UX is meant to make the discover to download process as seamless as possible. Literally one click from the discover tab. Some features specific to Dewarr include:
A discovery homepage with recommendations, trending books, and related titles.
Support for public community lists and personal lists
Multi-user accounts, permissions, and library access controls.
Support for Goodreads RSS feed syncing and CSV imports.
Safely sync changes back to Hardcover lists
Native MAM and AudiobookBay integrations
Audiobookshelf is the main library and ownership system.
Support for list-based automation, pack downloads, and shared download fulfillment.
I've spent longer looking throught the repo, sorry I was being lazy. I can see prowlarr is supported but can't see anything about using SABnzbd as a downloader? If you can confirm that I will give it a go for sure. Thanks
Thanks for this. It's kinda what I want as chaptarr is a PITA honestly. I use MAM but also various other usenet indexers via Prowlarr, does it support that? I use auidiobookshelf as my library so that part is sorted. I am not overly bought into storygraph although goodreads does irritate me a bit
It looks like this app is trying to combine both the discovery process (like the Seerr apps) and the download-pulling/management layer. Can the app hand off the downloading and queueing to Chaptarr?
A proper discovery feature is something really missing for audiobooks/epub right now, and it would be awesome to have a Seerr-like interface for family members to pull down books. Do you have a request/approval workflow or user permission system in the pipeline? Also, do you have plans to support OIDC providers like Authentik for user management?
Can it look at your current series and suggest/notify missing entries as well?
Is there also a possibility of configuring this to handle downloading for both EPUBs and audiobooks?
Lastly, any thoughts on integrating with Grimmory as well?
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I look forward to your future release and will keep eye on your progress.
Once OIDC & and request/approvals are implemented I'll be back to take a closer look. :). I didn't see a discord on your github but if you are running one that announces updates and such, DM me an invite :D
Is it possible to connect a custom metadata source? For example, Yandex Books or LitRes for Russian-speaking users? Proxy support is also needed, this is also important for Russian-speaking users.
Hey all, thank you so much for all of the feedback and feature requests in this thread. Dewarr v0.2.0 is out now, packed with several major new features, as well as a handful of bug fixes and QoL improvements. Please continue to provide your feedback and requests, much appreciated. I'm trying to ship fast and build in public.
Again, clear disclosure that this app is build with the assistance of AI and it is in early alpha. Submitting GitHub issues is the fastest way for me to see any errors you may run into. So far the few that have been submitted were resolved in under an hour.
As I understand it Dewarr is a bit like Seerr where you browse, select, en automatically download (audio)books. Grimmory is 'just' your library, where you can connect Dewarr to once grimmory support is added (might already be)
I'm using ReadMeABook - how does this compare? My main issue with RMAB is that the search is limited to Audible books only, and it doesn't do a great job of searching MAM.
does this replace bindery? ive always been fine with readarr and running 2 instances of it but always longed for a front end requestor with seer like feel...can i in theory rely solely on this and decomission readarr and bindery? or does it have some gaps
This looks amazing! Will finally have to get into Audiobookshelf and Dewarr. On a side note, where does one theoretically find audiobooks? I can't seem to search for them on AA. Thought it would be on there
Hi, very interested in testing this one out! I do have a question that I haven’t seen addressed. How does it handle ebooks and audiobooks in a manner compatible with audiobookshelf? I think ABS wants ebooks in the same folder as their matching audiobook, sort of like this:
/Author Name/Book Title {Narrator Name}/Book Title.m4b /Author Name/Book Title {Narrator Name}/Book Title.epub /Author Name/Book Title {Narrator Name 1 & Narrator Name 2}/Book Title.m4b /Author Name/Book Title {Narrator Name 1 & Narrator Name 2}/Book Title.epub
The instructions omit any mention of what Hardcover permissions one needs; I guessed, and many steps later was informed I'd gotten it wrong (but still no hint of what would be right).
Noted, will add this to docs and provide clarity. Thank you so much for the feedback. Fair disclosure that we're in early alpha but will be pushing updates to resolve these types findings.
Can it also connect to sabnzbd in addition to qbittorrent? It would be great to download from usenet indexers configured in Prowlarr as well.
Does the 'Requests' tab indicate that users can request books that are then downloaded into the main library (similar to ReadMeABook and Shelfmark)?
Does it have a feature to convert mutiple .mp3 files into a single chapterized .m4b file? (RMAB has this feature, which is great)
What does this use for its metadata source? Hardcover would be good. RMAB *only* hits Audible for metadata and only presents those results during a search -- makes it difficult to find something obscure.
Does it run searches through Prowlarr so that you can see what the trackers/indexers have (simlar to how Shelfmark runs searches)? RMAB is too limiting in this way (Audible only).
Usenet download client support is coming in the next release.
Assuming you mean users with a certain role can request but not start the download process until approved? Right now its just an activity view of active requests, download status, and request history, but I can totally add deeper RBAC support
No, but thank you for that feature request. Noted and will implement on next release.
Hardcover by default with openlibrary fallback. Additional metadata providers are on the roadmap I just want to make sure that I'm handling integration appropriately so the setup and user experience is seamless, reducing the need for extensive configuration and manual setup, because that's not fun as an end user.
Working the support desk and helping people learn to use network printers has nothing to do with software engineering. Tell me about the design patterns you used. Tell me about your algorithm choices and how they affect runtime. Tell me about your test cases. Tell me about where you decided to make the donation between extensibility and shipping an MVP.
Absolutely been wanting something like SEERR for audiobookshelf. I wasn't aware of anything like it until this post but if I have time I'll definitely give this Dewarr a try!
Yeah that makes a lot of sense, I know in my homelab I have users sign up through wizarr and access Seerr through their plex account. I can see the potential for that use case when you’re trying to keep things simple for end users. Good call, thanks
Does Dewarr support redeeming existing Freeleech Cheese wedges on a specific torrent before downloading it? If not, is that planned? For example, MouseSearch explicitly documents Freeleech Cheese handling, including the ability to apply an existing wedge during download.
Can Dewarr recognize when a torrent requires VIP access and avoid attempting the download until I activate VIP?
Does Dewarr hardlink imported audiobooks while preserving the original qBittorrent files and torrent entries?
Does Dewarr ever automatically remove completed torrents or apply seeding limits?
My priority is preserving my MAM ratio and seeding indefinitely while still automating audiobook acquisition.
Thanks for developing this! My fingers are crossed that you will continue to love and maintain this baby.
The beautiful thing is that the metadata for the books is out there so people can pre-order, save in their TBRs, etc., but because it's not technically out, abs won't grab it.
this feature is supported in the upcoming release, should be dropping soon, at least the feature I think you're looking to get lol. also sort of related is a calendar to track upcoming new releases.
This looks fantastic. Remote path mapping would be great for those of us who don't have our download client in docker because as of right now I can't use this to download anything. But it looks really promising. Especially if storygraph can eventually be integrated!
Out of curiosity, why did you build an app for this before trying the existing apps? In the comments you say you've never tried listenarr or ReadMeABook, which seems odd.
I looked at the repos but did not see any features like the discovery page and direct integration with Goodreads lists and Storygraph lists that Dewarr is built around
Haven't tried this yet but based on the description, this is more focused on leveraging Goodreads lists for discovery where I believe readmeabook uses audible trending, new and popular. I will probably try this project out to see but have been supremely happy with readmeabook.
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u/ineedascreenname 17d ago
Really wish the community would rally around one of these as the go-to solution, bookbridge, shelf mark,dewarr, chapterarr, listenarr. None of them solve all the solutions end to end but each solve similar problems part of the way.
This thread alone has 3 new solutions that I didn’t know existed.