Calibre MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching and reading books from your Calibre ebook library. That is what the calibre mcp mcp server brings to an AI assistant: the same capability, reachable through the Model Context Protocol rather than a separate app or dashboard.

The short version

• Full-text search — with automatic phrase matching and fuzzy fallback
• Search by author — or title with partial matching
• Extract text excerpts — from books with keyword highlighting and pagination
• Pure bash implementation using calibredb CLI
• Returns Calibre deep links (calibre://) and file URLs (file://)
• Robust timeout handling for macOS compatibility

Getting it running

Installation goes through your MCP client rather than a global install: point it at @modelcontextprotocol/inspector on npm and it is fetched when the client starts. The copy-paste blocks for Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor are further down this page.

What it needs from you

• Calibre installed at /Applications/calibre.app - A Calibre library at ~/Calibre Library - Text (.txt) exports of your books for excerpt functionality - Bash 4.0 or later

Things to watch

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• Keep per-call confirmation enabled while you learn its behaviour; it is the cheapest safeguard you have.

How it compares

Plenty of developer tooling servers cover similar ground. The differences that matter in practice are scope of access and how much setup stands between you and a working tool call. It is maintained by trieloff; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

SyncDev reviews every entry in this directory against the project's own documentation before publishing, and revisits them as servers change.