this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Announcement: Retirement of Readarr

We would like to announce that the Readarr project has been retired. This difficult decision was made due to a combination of factors: the project's metadata has become unusable, we no longer have the time to remake or repair it, and the community effort to transition to using Open Library as the source has stalled without much progress.

Third-party metadata mirrors exist, but as we're not involved with them at all, we cannot provide support for them. Use of them is entirely at your own risk. The most popular mirror appears to be rreading-glasses.

Without anyone to take over Readarr development, we expect it to wither away, so we still encourage you to seek alternatives to Readarr.

Key Points

  • Effective Immediately: The retirement takes effect immediately. Please stay tuned for any possible further communications.
  • Support Window: We will provide support during a brief transition period to help with troubleshooting non metadata related issues.
  • Alternative Solutions: Users are encouraged to explore and adopt any other possible solutions as alternatives to Readarr.
  • Opportunities for Revival: We are open to someone taking over and revitalizing the project. If you are interested, please get in touch.
  • Gratitude: We extend our deepest gratitude to all the contributors and community members who supported Readarr over the years.

Thank you for being part of the Readarr journey. For any inquiries or assistance during this transition, please contact our team.

Sincerely,
The Servarr Team

The github repo has been archived.

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[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 35 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I noticed that my Ansible playbook failed to do a docker pull on readarr, I just commented it and was going to investigate further today. This sucks, especially because rreading-glasses did in fact completely solve the issue they're facing. Not sure why they didn't consider migrating to it officially, it's only a config change.

[–] rozlav@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Readerr have been removed everywhere on rreading-glasses readme, maybe there is something related to law issues ? Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

Yeah, it's probably a legal thing, rreading-glasses is just metadata for books, completely legal, but readarr legality is less clear, so maybe they're trying to prevent issues.

Also I didn't understand what is rreading-glasses and why you need it

Say you want to grab a book by Isaac Asimov, you type the name of the book in readarr search bar, readarr contacts a metadata provider to show you cover images, author, date, etc. Then when you select the book readarr uses that metadata to search for downloads and ensure you're getting the correct book and not another random book with the same name.

The problem is that readarr uses a closed source API for it's metadata, and it's constantly offline, which makes it impossible to use readarr. Luckily they allow you to customize the URL for the API, and rreading-glasses is an open source implementation of that API that you can use as a drop in replacement.

[–] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm hoping someone will have some info about what happened because it seems strange. What does this mean?

Unlike R——'s proprietary service, this is much faster, handles large authors, has full coverage of G——R—— (or Hardcover!)

[–] beerclue@lemmy.world 10 points 2 days ago

I believe R-- stands for Readarr and G--R-- stands for GoodReads.

Because one of the main issues is they also don’t have anyone maintaining the project. There’s no one to make the config change.