Bindery

The Readarr replacement built to outlive its metadata sources.
Automated ebook & audiobook management for Usenet & torrents — monitor authors, search indexers, download, organize.

Mobile-friendly

Why Bindery?

You probably got here because Readarr died. The official project was archived in June 2025 when its metadata backend (api.bookinfo.club) went permanently offline — one dead endpoint took the whole app down. The community forks that followed lean on Goodreads scrapers that break whenever the site changes its HTML.

Bindery is built so that can't happen to you:

• No single point of failure for metadata. OpenLibrary leads, with Google Books, Hardcover, DNB, Audnex, and Audible behind it, and Nasjonalbiblioteket and the BnF available as opt in primaries for Norwegian and French libraries. All documented public APIs, zero scraping. If one source degrades, the others carry the library.
• Bring your dead Readarr install with you. Import readarr.db and your authors, indexers, download clients, and blocklist come across in one step. No re-entry, no CSV gymnastics.
• Boring to run, by design. A single Go binary with the UI embedded, SQLite, no external database, no sidecars, no nginx. Distroless image, Helm chart, and ARM builds down to a Pi Zero.

Clean-room Go rewrite, modern React UI, MIT-licensed, actively developed.

[!TIP] Coming from Readarr? Keep your library — point Bindery at the old database:

bash bindery migrate readarr /path/to/readarr.db

Authors are resolved again against your primary metadata provider and its fallbacks (Readarr's bookinfo.club backend is gone); indexers, download clients, and blocklist port across. Prefer the UI? Settings → Import. Full guide: Migrating from Readarr.

How Bindery compares

Pick Bindery for a modern, low-maintenance manager that survives metadata outages and swallows your old Readarr database whole. Pick LazyLibrarian if you want a long-established tool with magazine and comic support and don't mind a dated UI. Pick Livrarr if you want the same single-binary spirit and don't need the maturity, the Readarr import, Pi-class ARM, or a Helm chart yet. Calibre-Web / Audiobookshelf solve a different problem — serving an already-curated library, not automating acquisition — and pair well downstream of Bindery.

_{Competitor details verified June 2026 (Readarr archived 2025-06-27; LazyLibrarian active community fork; Livrarr v0.1.0-alpha5). Livrarr rechecked September 2026: v0.1.0-alpha6. Spotted something out of date? Open an issue.}

Features

Library management - Author monitoring via OpenLibrary's author-works endpoint, configurable author monitor modes, all, future, latest or none as the install default plus a per-author mode that follows only the series you pick, per-book monitor toggles, and a wanted → imported workflow with live download progress on the Queue page. - Unattended release discovery: monitored authors are checked for new books on a schedule, so a followed author's next book joins the library without a click. It ships off; turn it on in Settings, General, New release discovery by picking Daily, Weekly or Monthly. Opt an author out with Monitor new items: Don't add them. - Dual-format books — each title holds an ebook and an audiobook in independent slots, with separate search, grab, and import pipelines, and the audiobook side moves multi-part .m4b / .mp3 folders as one unit. - Series support with position tracking and search by series title, a book's series and position fixable from the book itself (a book you take out of a series stays out on refresh), edition tracking (format / ISBN / publisher / page count), Calendar view of upcoming releases, and multiple library roots. - Library scan matching in five passes: exact ASIN, then a backwards Author - Title filename whose folder author the catalogue already knows, then the filename's title, then the book folder's title, and finally series name plus position. Every title pass is one fuzzy comparison that has to agree on the author as well, and a file is left unmatched rather than attached to a book whose title only looks alike when each title has words the other lacks (Harry Potter en de Relieken van de Dood is not Harry Potter en de Orde van de Feniks). A title that contains the other, such as Dune and Dune Messiah, is not caught by this check and matches as before. Honours librarian sort-suffix form (Title, The) and series-annotated filenames ([Mistborn, Book 1]). - Library adoption: whatever the scan could not match waits on the Import page as one row per book (an audiobook folder or disc set is one row), with suggested matches (one click Confirm only for a strong match), one "Add author" decision per missing author, and Undo. Files are registered where they are, never moved. - Author aliases (RR Haywood / R.R. Haywood / R R Haywood merge into one canonical row), and metadata re-bind to correct a wrong match without delete-and-re-add. On a book’s File → Re-bind dialog, search configured metadata providers and select an OpenLibrary work or Hardcover book, or enter an exact provider ID and press Enter. Results already in the library are marked and link to the existing book; records belonging to another library book cannot be selected. Each result’s Links menu opens its upstream page when available; OpenLibrary editions can be viewed but require a work ID for re-binding. Re-binding updates metadata and series without moving files; author mismatches require confirmation. - Explicit author-catalogue reconciliation with a selectable preview: remove chosen stale metada