📚 librarian

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

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 6 read-only tools — list_books, list_chapters, find, get_chapters, book_info, verify_quote — so Claude can browse the catalog, search it, pull chapters under a token budget, and check its own quotes against the source 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" }
    }
  }
}

Verify quotes

An MCP server that catches Claude misquoting your books.

lib verify "quote" checks whether a quote actually appears in your library, verbatim — punctuation, case, ё/е, and markdown formatting don't count. Two modes:

• Book mode (--book <id>): full scan of one book — "does this book actually say this?" Works without the search index.
• Shelf mode (no --book)

... View full README on GitHub