I find it very confusing to get a good workflow with it + calibre.

I sync all of my books (and use readarr for organization or occasionally grabbing books from dead authors) via syncthing. Then calibre web won't ingest any new books I copy to the folder, so I have to go to desktop calibre to add them manually, then it will sync the database and calibre-web has a built-in task for scanning any database changes so then the book will show up.

Seems like a clunky method and I would think I am doing it wrong, but I haven't found a way for calibre to scan books already organized in folders in its book directory.

Hmm so how does the workflow look like for you? Is the calibre web tied up to the DB of that calibre VNC? Do you manually add the books to calibre over the VNC? Then is calibre web allowed to make changes to the DB or does it have read only access? as far as I understand calibre is not recommended to have multiple sources of changes to the DB as it can end up corrupted or something? (At least it can't resolve conflicts I think)

As a solution it seems like it could work, but it feels like over complicated to get around the limitations of calibre.

Yes, they share the database.
Yes, I add the books to calibre.
I think I have it as read only for calibre-web.

Regarding overcomplication, I admit the initial setup took a while. But I've had it running for a couple years now with no major issues.

You can have calibre auto import from a folder. Though be careful because it deletes them from that folder (you might want to do single direction sync into that folder).

And if you share the db with calibre-web or have some other sync method that works, you should be good to go.

Caliber

Thank you I appreciate the info I mentally already shifted to not using amazon for ebooks anymore but there are occasional sales I'll have to get this new method setup soon.

... comics and manga, which is another aspect I've been noticing calibre does not do such a great job

Absolutely. Calibre is horrible with anything that is fixed format. I recently backed up my entire Kindle library with about 1k manga volumes, expecting to be able to convert from KFX to EPUB format as I have been doing for my regular books for 15+ years. Calibre failed awfully at this. The only thing it's reasonably good at with comics, is converting to ZIP format. So I had to write a Python script to take the KFX -> ZIP outputs from Calibre and convert them into working EPUB files.

Most of my ebooks are large as they are comics. You also have EPUB3 ebooks now, which can contain images and audio in them too (think combined ebook + audiobook). So they can get pretty large.

Oooo, I didn't know that. That's fancy