📚 librarian

Turn any ebook into clean, token-counted Markdown chapters — let Claude read your bookshelf over MCP and catch it misquoting your books. Deterministic RAG: no embeddings, no network, no API keys.

Any input format — FB2, EPUB, DOCX, HTML, TXT/MD, text-layer PDF — becomes a directory of clean chapters with token counts. No network, no LLM, no randomness: the same input always produces byte-identical output.

Install

uv tool install librarian-cli
# or: pipx install librarian-cli

Offline contract: install and runtime need no network (the tokenizer's vocabulary is vendored in the package).

Related MCP server: access-calibre

Quick start

lib ingest examples/*.epub
lib list
lib find curiouser
lib get <book-id> --budget 3000

Commands

Library root: --library <path> (or the LIB_HOME env var, default ./library). Data goes to stdout, diagnostics to stderr. Exit codes: 0 success, 1 runtime error, 2 usage error.

Give Claude your bookshelf

librarian-cli ships a built-in stdio MCP server with 6 read-only tools — list_books, list_chapters, find, get_chapters, book_info, verify_quote — so Claude can browse the catalog, search it, pull chapters under a token budget, and check its own quotes against the source on its own: deterministic RAG with no embeddings, no network, and no API keys.

Claude Code:

claude mcp add librarian --env LIB_HOME=$HOME/books -- uvx librarian-cli

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "librarian": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["librarian-cli"],
      "env": { "LIB_HOME": "/path/to/books" }
    }
  }
}

Verify quotes

An MCP server that catches Claude misquoting your books.

lib verify "quote" checks whether a quote actually appears in your library, verbatim — punctuation, case, ё/е, and markdown formatting don't count. Two modes:

• Book mode (--book <id>): full scan of one book — "does this book actually say this?" Works without the search index.

• Shelf mode (no --book): attribution across the whole library via FTS5 candidates — "which book is this from?" The quote needs at least 5 significant words (stop words don't count), or the check is skipped with verdict: null.

lib verify "Рукописи не горят" --book bulgakov-master-i-margarita
lib verify "рукописи не горят никогда"

Exit codes (grep-style semantics, a deliberate departure from the project's usual "1 = runtime error" — see docs/MILESTONES.md deviation 38):

Script discriminator: exit 1 with non-empty stdout means "checked, not confirmed"; exit 1 with empty stdout means an error (diagnostics went to stderr instead). Exit 0 includes close — a strict CI gate must check verdict == "exact" in the --json output, not the exit code alone.

Quality

Every book gets a score from five metrics (coverage, structure, garbage, encoding, dehyphenation): ok (score ≥ 0.90, no hard triggers) — saved silently; review (0.60 ≤ score < 0.90, or triggers present) — saved with a warning, details via lib doctor <id>; failed (score < 0.60) — not saved. Scans and password-protected PDFs honestly fail (OCR and DRM removal are out of scope).

Determinism

The pipeline has no network access, no LLM calls, and no randomness — the same input file always produces byte-identical output. That makes ingestion reproducible and cacheable, and it's what makes lib serve's RAG deterministic: no embeddings to drift, no model calls to vary between runs.

Limitations

• PDF: works well on typographically normal books; complex layouts may land in review.

• DRM is not circumvented; source legality is the user's responsibility.

• Networked filesystems (NFS/SMB) are not supported (the advisory lock isn't reliable there).

• MOBI/DJVU and text-less scans are not supported (v3 candidates: OCR, calibre).

• CLI messages are currently in Russian; English output is planned.

• lib verify: quotes spanning a chapter boundary are not supported (v1) — the best you'll get is distorted on one half.

• lib verify: close on a single-word replacement is realistic from ~150 characters of quote; shorter quotes with a replaced word honestly land in distorted — a third of a three-word quote really is a distortion.

• lib verify shelf mode (no --book) needs the FTS5 search index; book mode (--book <id>) works without it in the CLI. lib serve as a whole still requires FTS5 — it syncs the index at startup regardless of which tool gets called.

• lib verify in book mode scans the whole chapter text in pure Python; a long book can take a few seconds of CPU. The MCP tool runs it in a worker thread so it doesn't block the rest of the server.

Русская версия

See README.ru.md for the Russian documentation.