Important
The original R—— project has been retired, but there are community forks available which continue to work by using rreading-glasses metadata:
Corrective lenses for curmudgeonly readars in your life.
tl;dr: follow these instructions.
This is a drop-in replacement for R——'s (now defunct) metadata service. It works with your existing R—— installation, it's backwards-compatible with your library, and it takes only seconds to enable or disable. You can use it permanently, or temporarily to help you add books the R—— service doesn't have yet. It works equally well with ebooks and audiobooks.
Unlike R——'s proprietary service, this is much faster, handles large authors, has full coverage of G——R—— (or Hardcover!), and doesn't take months to load new books. Hosted instances are available at https://api.bookinfo.pro (G——R——) and https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro, but it can also be self-hosted.
graph LR;
R[R——]-.->M[official metadata];
R--> api.bookinfo.pro;
classDef dotted stroke-dasharray:2,text-decoration:line-through;
class M dotted;
Loading
As of August 2025 there are ~6100 daily users of the shared instance. Here's what some of them have said so far:
Man this is wayyyyyy better than the inhouse metadata, thank you!!
This is fucking awesome, thank you!!!
I just added this, and omg it fixed so many issues i've been having! Thank you!
Holy shit can I just say this is so much better.
This is fucking fantastic. Came across your link, thought hmm I bet this'll be crap. Reinstalled R, added your site, instantly found the 5 upcoming books that I couldn't. thank you!
Already had it pull in an extra book from an author that came out in September that wasn't originally found! Will definitely be a rreading glasses evangalist! haha
My arr instance has been switched over since yesterday, and it really has cleaned up that instance. I've been getting a lot of use out of it.
it worked! thanks my man, my wife will be happy with this
Thanks so much for putting this together again, I can't tell you how much I appreciate it!
The easiest way to use this metadata is via a community fork of R—— which has already been configured to use a shared instance:
See the table below for important differences between the two options for metadata.
G——R—— Hardcover "Official" metadata Summary Lower quality but backward-compatible with existing R—— installations. Makes all of G——R—— available, including large authors and books not previously available in R——. Higher quality metadata but not backward compatible. Requires a fresh installation. Didn't support some of the most popular authors and was always half a year out of date. New releases? Supported Supported Unsupported Large authors? Supported Supported Unsupported Curation? Metadata isn't really editable by users. An active community of librarians curate metadata. You can request changes in #book-data-requests. N/A Source code Public Public Private Stability Stable, nearly identical behavior to "official" R—— metadata. Beta, still loading data. Unmaintained Backward compatibility Fully compatible with existing R—— databases and Docker images. Requires a custom R—— Docker image and fresh database. N/A Hosted instancehttps://api.bookinfo.pro https://hardcover.bookinfo.pro N/A Self-hosted image blampe/rreading-glasses:latest blampe/rreading-glasses:hardcover N/A
Please consider supporting Hardcover if you use them as your source. It's $5/month (or $50/year) and the work they are doing to break down the G——R—— monopoly is commendable.
If you're self-hosting or still using legacy R—— images, navigate to http(s)://<your instance>/settings/development. This page isn't shown in the UI, so you'll need to manually enter the URL.
Update Metadata Provider Source with https://api.bookinfo.pro if you'd like to use the public instance. If you're self-hosting use your own address.
Click Save.
You can now search and add authors or works not available on the official service.
Important
Metadata is periodically refreshed and in some cases existing files may become unmapped (see note above about subtitles). You can correct this from Library > Unmapped Files, or do a Manual Import from an author's page.
Images are available at blampe/rreading-glasses. The latest tag uses G——R—— for metadata and the hardcover tag uses Hardcover. See the table below for a summary of the differences between the two.
A Postgres backend (any version) is required.
Two docker compose example files are included as a reference: docker-compose-gr.yml and docker-compose-hardcover.yml.
The app will use as much memory as it has available for in-memory caching, so it's recommended to run the container with a --memory limit or similar.
When using Hardcover you must set the hardcover-auth parameter.
Hardcover API.Bearer.--hardcover-auth="Bearer <your token>".Note that your API key will expire every year on January 1, so you'll need to periodically regenerate it.
Resource requirements are minimal; a Raspberry Pi should suffice. Storage requirements will vary depending on the size of your library, but in most cases shouldn't exceed a few gigabytes for personal use. (The published image doesn't require any large data dumps and will gradually grow your database as it's queried over time.)
When in doubt, make sure you have the latest image pulled: docker pull blampe/rreading-glasses:latest or blampe/rreading-glasses:hardcover.
If you suspect data inconsistencies, request an author refresh and wait a little while. Note that R—— caches metadata locally for ~30 minutes in cache.db and this file is safe to remove if you want to force the app to grab the latest metadata (just restart after you delete the db).
You can also try deleting the rreading-glasses database to ensure you don't have any bad data cached. (If this does resolve your problem please let me know because that's a bug.)
If these steps don't resolve the problem, please create an issue!
I have deviated slightly from the official service's behavior to make a couple of, in my opinion, quality of life improvements.
The first time an author is encountered their books will be incomplete while their data is loaded in the background. This is what allows large authors and more real-time data ingestion to work. You can still add books for an author while their data is being loaded, you just need to search for them manually. If you see an author that looks incomplete, wait a little bit or request a refresh.
Titles no longer automatically include subtitles unless it's part of a series, or if multiple books have the same primary title. This de-clutters the UI, cleans up the directory layout, and improves import matching but you may need to re-import some works with long subtitles.
The "best" (original) edition is always preferred to make cover art more consistently high-quality. Additionally, books are no longer returned with every edition ever released, because that makes manual edition selection difficult to impossible. Instead, at most 20 of the top editions are included and de-duplicated by language and title. This may change in the future.
This project implements an API-compatible, coalescing read-through cache for consumption by the R—— metadata client. It is not a fork of any prior work and it was made without any help from the S—— team.
The service is pluggable and can serve metadata from any number of sources: API clients, data dumps, OpenLibrary proxies, scrapers, or other means. The interface to implement is:
type Getter interface {
GetWork(ctx context.Context, workID int64) (*WorkResource, error)
GetAuthor(ctx context.Context, authorID int64) (*AuthorResource, error)
GetBook(ctx context.Context, bookID int64) (*WorkResource, error)
}
In other words, anything that understands how to map a G——R—— ID to a Resource can serve as a source of truth. This project then provides caching and API routes to make that source compatible with R——.
Postgres is used as a backend but only as a key-value store, unlike the official server which performs expensive joins in the request path. Additionally large authors (and books with many editions) are populated asynchronously. This allows the server to support arbitrarily large resources without issue.
This is primarily a personal project that fixes my own workflows. There are almost certainly edge cases I haven't accounted for, so contributions are very welcome!
Accept-Encoding: gzip headers.This software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement.
In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.
This software is intended for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to, and does not, constitute legal, financial, or professional advice of any kind. The user of this software assumes all responsibility for its use or misuse.
The user is free to use, modify, and distribute the software for any purpose, subject to the above disclaimers and conditions.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4