sebastos: a sync client for Standard Ebooks

The folks over at Standard Ebooks provide a fabulous collection of public domain books, beautifully produced.

I recently purchased a Kobo e-reader, and want to load it with some of those ebooks, getting updates as new books become available, and without having to download and copy a bunch of files. This client makes that easy.

Getting started

Make a directory for sebastos to run from. If you have your ereader plugged in and mounted, this can be on the device itself.

For example, on my Mac with my Kobo plugged in and mounted:

cd /Volumes/KOBOeReader
mkdir sebastos
cd sebastos
uvx sebastos init

The init subcommand will scan the standardebooks github organisation for ebooks, and download their metadata. This process will take a few minutes to complete. At any later time, you can use the update subcommand to redo this scan. This will only download metadata for new ebooks, so it will be substantially quicker than the initial scan.

Edit the .sebastos/config.toml file and set up as many [[query]] blocks as you like, to download by author, subject, title, and so on. By default, the following query is provided as an example, which will download Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

[[query]]
author = "Jane Austen"
title = "Pride*"

Run uvx sebastos sync and matching books will be downloaded. If you’ve pared back your queries, books may be deleted, although the tool will ask you to confirm before it does so.

If you’d like to see the metadata that queries run against, just run uvx sebastos list

Configuration

Donations

I’m conscious that Standard Ebooks rely upon donations to operate. You can donate here - please do so if you find some value in this tool.