Calibre vs Calibre Web Automated on a Seedbox: Which One, and Why the Logins Differ

Short answer

Install Calibre Web Automated if you want to read your books in a browser, feed them to an ereader app and have new books filed for you when you drop them in a folder. Install Calibre if you want the full desktop program, the one with the conversion dialog, the metadata editor and the ebook editor, running on your appbox instead of on your laptop.

Plenty of people want both, and that works, because they open the same library folder. The catch is that they don't share a login. Calibre takes your appbox username. Calibre Web Automated takes the username admin. That one detail is behind every "the password from the installer doesn't work" ticket we've had about it, so it gets its own section below.

What each one is

They have similar names and very different shapes.

Calibre is the linuxserver image of the actual program. You get a desktop in your browser with Calibre open on it, and everything the desktop version can do works here: convert a MOBI to EPUB, fix a cover, bulk edit series names, open the ebook editor and fix a broken chapter. It's heavy on purpose. It's what you open when you have work to do on the collection.

Calibre Web Automated, CWA for short, is Calibre-Web with an import pipeline bolted on. Calibre-Web is the reading room: you browse your shelves, read in the browser, hand out accounts to the household and point ereader apps at it. The "Automated" part is the folder. Anything you put in ~/media/book-ingest gets picked up, converted if you've told it to, given metadata and filed into the library. Upstream says it handles 27 formats on the way in, converts to EPUB by default, and can target EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, KEPUB or PDF instead.

The login, and why it isn't your username

Every app on an appbox gets a password minted at install time, and it's shown on the app's tile in the panel. For most apps the username is your appbox username, and Calibre follows that rule. Its login is a browser prompt in front of the desktop, and it wants your appbox username plus the Calibre tile's password.

Calibre Web Automated doesn't follow it, and that's not something we chose for fun. Calibre-Web creates one account on its first start, called admin, with the password admin123, and that password is printed in every README on the internet. It has no way to rename that account from the command line. So when you install it here we set our own password on admin before the server ever starts, which means admin123 never works on your box, not even for a second. The account keeps its name.

So the login on Calibre Web Automated is:

• Username: admin
• Password: the one on the Calibre Web Automated tile, not the Calibre one

If you have both installed, the two passwords are different, and so are the usernames. If CWA says "Wrong Username or Password", check those two things before anything else. We've looked at the logs on these tickets and it has been the username every time. The panel doesn't show admin on the tile yet. That's on us and it's on the list.

Once you're in, change the password under your admin profile if you like, and make separate accounts for anyone else who reads from it. Calibre-Web's user list is per account, so a partner or a kid can have their own shelves and download rights without ever touching admin.

One library, two doors

Both apps open ~/media/calibre. It's a normal Calibre library: a metadata.db file and a folder per author. If you already have a library on your laptop, upload the whole folder there over SFTP and both apps will find it. CWA picks the library up from that folder on its own, and in Calibre you choose it in the welcome wizard as /config/Calibre Library, which is the same folder seen from inside the container.

Removing either app leaves the library where it is. Uninstall removes the app's settings in ~/.config, never your books.

A sensible way to run both:

1. Let CWA do the everyday intake. Drop books in the ingest folder, read them in CWA or an ereader app.
2. Open Calibre when you want to do real work, like a big metadata cleanup or a conversion with custom settings.
3. Don't do heavy editing in both at the same moment. They write to the same metadata.db, and two programs changing one SQLite file at once is how libraries get hurt. If CWA shows something stale after an editing session in Calibre, restart CWA from the panel.

The ingest folder deletes what you put in it

This is the part to read twice. Upstream's own wording is that every file in the ingest folder is deleted after it's processed. That's the point of it, it's an inbox, not a shelf. The book ends up in ~/media/calibre and the copy you dropped is gone.

So copy books into ~/media/book-ingest, don't move your only copy there. And don't point a download client or a grabber straight at it either. Upstream says downloading directly into the ingest folder isn't supported and can cause duplicate imports or a corrupt database. Let the download finish somewhere else, then copy the finished file in.

That matters if you use Bindery, which files ebooks into ~/media/books. Keep it that way, and copy into the ingest folder from there:

cp ~/media/books/"Author Name"/*.epub ~/media/book-ingest/

Your Bindery copy stays put, CWA files its own copy into the Calibre library, and neither app is writing into a folder the other one is deleting from.

If something lands in the ingest folder and nothing happens, press Refresh Library in CWA's top bar. Upstream added that for exactly this, and it re-runs the import on anything still sitting there.

Reading on a device

CWA has an OPDS feed at https://calibre-web-automated.USERNAME.SERVER/opds. Ereader apps that speak OPDS (KOReader, Moon+ Reader, Panels and plenty of others) can browse and download from it with a Calibre-Web username and password. That's also the reason CWA isn't behind the extra appbox login prompt that Calibre has: an ereader app can answer CWA's own login, it can't answer two in a row. It means CWA's own password is the only lock on it, so don't hand out admin, make readers their own accounts.

Send to eReader, which emails a book to a Kindle address, works too, but it needs an outgoing mail server filled in under the admin settings first. CWA doesn't come with one.

Which one should you install?

• You mostly read, on a phone or an ereader: CWA on its own. It's lighter and it's the one with the import folder.
• You curate a big collection and like the desktop tools: Calibre, and add CWA if you want to read from the same library away from the desk.
• You grab books automatically: Bindery for the grabbing, CWA for the reading, and the copy step above in between.
• Comics and manga: look at Komga first. It can point at ~/media/calibre too and only reads from it.
• Audiobooks: neither. That's Audiobookshelf.

Ebooks are small, so storage isn't the thing to plan around here. Appbox Lite is EUR 5 a month for 500 GB and runs both Calibre apps, and if the books share the box with a film library, Appbox +1 is EUR 11 for 1000 GB and Appbox +3 is EUR 14 for 3000 GB. Every plan is on the plans page.

Quick checklist

• Calibre login: your appbox username plus the Calibre tile's password.
• Calibre Web Automated login: admin plus the CWA tile's password.
• Both use ~/media/calibre. Uninstalling either keeps it.
• ~/media/book-ingest deletes what it imports. Copy into it, never download into it.
• Readers get their own CWA accounts, not admin.