How to index and search a big library of ebooks and documents on Windows PCs? Various ideas from across reddit:
Paperless-ngx? Designed for documents at least, unsure how well it would handle books
AnythingLLM
Under the Windows platform, dtSearch is an excellent answer.
Recoll is free/open source (GPL) that can index PDFs and search them very quickly. It uses Xapian under the hood. I have over 165,000 documents indexed on an old laptop running Linux and can query them all in a split second.
Recoll was originally Linux-only but the developer released a Windows port a few years ago that I have used on both Windows 10 and Windows 11. There is a one-time fee for the Windows build but it is not a paid service like Evernote. Some configuration is required when setting it up but most of that would be if you wanted to index other filetypes besides PDF.
docspell
apache lucene
Calibre
readera
Copernic was useful. Discontinued.
I use https://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html to index and search large repos of docs. I use Papermerge for my digital file cabinet though. DocFetcher is good for searching an existing repository of files.
It‘ll even show you the places in the document the text appears, so you can decide whether to open the document.
Only problem is that you have to manually re-scan the folders to update the index. Not too big of a deal, but still…
There‘s also Agent Ransack that indexes the folders for each search…
sist2
I have tried sist2 & recollindex …both on my RADXA3E SBC with 4GB RAM ……..both works however sist2 elastic search bogs down & is not suitable for SBC ….recollindex properly setup is the way to go Also has webUI that can be started by systemd
everything
OpenKM for absolutely all my data at home
AbeMeda, it can catalog files, create thumbnails, search inside archives and pdf files. Maybe you can try this alternative