Add, remove, or replace tags for books matching a search query. Useful for bulk organization tasks like categorizing all books by an author or cleaning up tag names.

Compare metadata between multiple books side-by-side. Useful for deciding which duplicate to keep, verifying metadata consistency, or identifying differences between editions. Highlights differences between books.

Fetch a short text excerpt from a book's content. Extracts the beginning of a book to preview its content. Useful for checking writing style, confirming the right book, or getting a taste of the content.

Find potential duplicate books in the library. Helps identify books that may have been added multiple times with slight variations in metadata. Returns groups of potentially duplicate books for review.

Search inside book content using Calibre's full-text search. Finds quotes, passages, and references within books. Note: Requires FTS indexing to be enabled in Calibre library settings.

Generate Claude Desktop configuration for this MCP server. Outputs the JSON snippet to add to your Claude Desktop config file.

List all tags in the Calibre library with book counts. Useful for exploring available categories, finding popular tags, or planning tag-based organization.

Get detailed metadata for a specific book by its Calibre ID. Returns title, authors, tags, formats, identifiers, publication info, and more.

Get all books by a specific Calibre author ID. More precise than searching by name when dealing with authors who have similar names. Use search_authors_by_name to find author IDs first.

Get all books by a specific author. Returns book details including title, series, tags, and formats. Use search_authors_by_name first if you need to find the exact author name.

Get all books in a series with proper reading order. Books are sorted by series index to show the correct sequence. Useful for finding what books are in a series and planning reading order.

Get all books with a specific tag. Useful for browsing themed collections or finding books in a category. Use get_all_tags to discover available tags first.

List all custom columns defined in the Calibre library. Custom columns allow users to add their own metadata fields (e.g., 'Read Status', 'Owned Format', 'Priority'). Returns column names, labels, and data types.

Get library statistics including total book count, format breakdown, tag counts, author counts, and series counts. Useful for understanding the composition of your Calibre library.

Run Calibre library maintenance operations: check integrity, backup metadata to OPF files, embed metadata into book files, or vacuum the database. Some operations modify files.

Check a reading list against your Calibre library. Reports which books you own and generates search links for missing titles. Great for processing 'to-read' lists or book recommendations.

Find and fix inconsistent author_sort values. Calibre uses author_sort for proper alphabetization (e.g., 'Tolkien, J.R.R.' for 'J.R.R. Tolkien'). Preview changes before applying.

Generate a quality report for the library, identifying books with missing metadata, covers, or other issues. Helps prioritize cleanup tasks.

List a few books from the configured Calibre library using calibredb list.

Search for authors by name pattern. Returns matching authors with their book counts. Useful for finding authors when you only remember part of their name.

Search for text within a specific book's content. Plain-text fallback when Calibre FTS is not available. Extracts the book to text and searches for matches with surrounding context.

Search for books by tag pattern. First finds all tags matching the pattern, then returns books with any of those tags. Useful for exploring related categories (e.g., 'fiction' finds books tagged 'Fiction', 'Science Fiction', 'Historical Fiction', etc.).

Search books by title with wildcard support. Simpler interface than search_books for quick title lookups. By default performs partial/contains matching (e.g., 'ring' finds 'The Lord of the Rings').

Search books in the Calibre library using Calibre's query language. Supports field-specific searches (title:, author:, tag:, series:, publisher:, format:, rating:, etc.) and boolean operators (and, or, not).

Update a custom column value for a book. WARNING: This modifies your Calibre library. Use get_custom_columns to see available columns and get_book_details to verify the book before updating.

Update metadata fields for a book. WARNING: This modifies your Calibre library. Only specified fields will be updated; others remain unchanged. Use get_book_details first to see current values.