librarian-cli 0.1.1

Deterministic book-to-markdown pipeline for LLM consumption

librarian

Turn any ebook into clean, token-counted Markdown chapters — and let Claude read your bookshelf over MCP. 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).

Quick start

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

Commands

Command	Purpose
lib ingest <files…> [--force] [--no-keep-source] [--config cfg.toml] [--verbose]	Process books into the library; prints a file · id · status · score table.
lib list [<book-id>]	No argument — all books; with an id — that book's chapters (n, title, tokens, summary).
lib get <book-id> <spec>	Print chapters by range (1-3,7) to stdout.
lib get <book-id> --budget N [--from K]	Greedily print consecutive chapters from K while the token sum stays ≤ N.
lib find <query> [--limit 10] [--book <id>] [--reindex] [--json]	Full-text search across chapters and titles/authors library-wide (bm25, snippets, RU/EN stemming).
lib info <book-id>	JSON: book metadata + quality metrics.
lib doctor [<book-id>]	No id — books in review and broken directories; with id — that book's report.
lib reingest --all [--config cfg.toml] [--verbose]	Rebuild the library from source/ with the current code/config.
lib rm <book-id>	Delete a book and rebuild the index.
lib serve [--library <path>]	Stdio MCP server over the library.

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 5 read-only tools — list_books, list_chapters, find, get_chapters, book_info — so Claude can browse the catalog, search it, and pull chapters under a token budget 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" }
    }
  }
}

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.

Русская версия

See README.ru.md for the Russian documentation.