Axum

積ん読 (tsundoku) is the Japanese word for the habit of acquiring books and letting them pile up unread. It’s an affectionate kind of self-deprecation, and it’s an uncomfortably accurate description of how I read manga. There’s always a new series I’ve heard is good, a sequel that just got a fresh volume, a thing someone mentioned in passing that I meant to look into. The pile only grows. A few months ago I wrote about Codex, the Rust digital library server I built to manage the comics, manga, and ebooks I already own. Codex is great at the “own” part. It scans my files, fetches metadata, tracks what I have. But it has nothing to say about the part that actually feeds the collection: discovery. What’s new? What got a new volume since I last looked? What have I been meaning to start but never got around to? ...

Three months ago I wrote about why I was building Codex: years of daily Komga use, a few stubborn limitations, and two previous attempts at building my own digital library server that fizzled out somewhere in the middle. The post was speculative in places. The core was working, but a lot of “what’s next” was still on a list. This is the follow-up. Three months of daily use later, here’s what changed, what shipped, and what I learned. ...

I love Komga. It’s been my go-to for managing comics, manga, and ebooks for years, and it genuinely does the job well. The UI is clean, the feature set is rich, and the community around it is great. If you self-host a digital reading collection and haven’t tried it, you should. But after years of daily use, I kept bumping into a few limitations that I couldn’t work around. And eventually, the itch to build something of my own became too strong to ignore. ...