This release is special to me because it is the launch of Kavita+, a subscription service which adds bonus features to the base Kavita, that otherwise wouldn't be feasible to include. Please note, this service is offered by me (majora2007), who is the main developer of Kavita. Kavita+ will not start gate keeping features from the base Kavita nor will it take over my development time. This is a way for me to raise money so that I can donate more of my time into Kavita and make it the best self-hosted reading software out there.

Kavita+ requires a monthly subscription of 4$/month/server instance (You can try if for 50% off with FREETRIAL promo code). Once unlocked, all users of the server will gain access to the premium features.

What comes with Kavita+? The initial release brings a few cool features:

• Scrobbling to AniList
• External Reviews
• External Ratings
• Recommendations (both what's on your server and what's not)
• Removal of the donation link

All these features can be read about in detail on our Wiki. If you are an Open Collective member, please reach out to me, if I have not already reached out. I will give you Kavita+ for free if you are donating at least the price of the subscription or a few months off if you've been donating. Third Party developers integrating with Kavita will also receive a subscription for free.

With Kavita+ out of the way, this release also contains a TON of polish and some nice enhancements I was trying a few releases back, like Plex-like Collection and Reading List covers:

I spent a lot of time working on fixing bugs across Kavita and within the readers themselves, including some very hard to reproduce ones, like characters being cutoff on the epub reader on some devices. I would encourage you all to read through the changelog and if you're experiencing a bug that doesn't seem to be in here or on Github, please raise it, else it will likely not get fixed.

For those that were waiting on Localization, don't fret. Although not in this release, I am still planning on it for next or the release after. I have a lot of QoL items for next release that I've been waiting to get to.

I want to reiterate that Kavita+ is an optional service and a way to fund me to continue to pour my time into Kavita. I have many plans to enhance Kavita over the years and a few more for Kavita+. I look forward to the feedback from you all and the future of Kavita.

Added

• Added: Added a whole new section for reviews (both Kavita user's, your own, and external) on the series detail page
• Added: Added ability to configure the amount of RAM for caching Kavita+ data (recs, reviews, and ratings). This is managed in appsettings.json via 'Cache' option. Defaults to 50MB.
• Added: Added ability to view external Recommendations for manga/book series. If user is an admin without Age Rating restrictions, external recommendations will show.
• Added: Added the ability for users to configure AniList as a scrobbling provider (on a Kavita+ licensed server) to scrobble reviews, ratings, want to read, and reading progress.
• Added: User Review can now have a short tagline to bring a high level information without users having to read the long review.
• Added: New user option to opt-into sharing Series reviews with other users in the server.
• Added: Added a hover-over to the progress bars in the app to know exact percentage of reading for a chapter/volume/series.
• Added: Added a new stat for reporting for last read time. This helps identify how many servers are in use versus just running Kavita.
• Added: Reading Lists and Collections without a manual cover set will generate a custom merged image based on chapter covers or series covers, assuming there is at least 4. These will be randomly generated every 24 hours. You may need to regenerate covers to take advantage as in v0.7.4, cover generation now forces aspect ratio and size.
• Added: Added the ability to disable scrobbling on a per-series per-user basis or at a library level. By default, Comic Libraries will have scrobbling turned off as there are no comic-based scrobbling providers.
• Added: Added the ability to see scrobbling errors for the admin, so they can be fixed (usually fixing series name or adding a anilist/mal weblink)
• Added: Added new spoiler tag css variables: --review-spoiler-bg-color and --review-spoiler-text-color (these are for spoliers within reviews from AniList)

Changed

• Changed: Reviews are now under the Series Metadata and in a card format to allow for a more streamlined experience. Your review will always be first with a star.
• Changed: User Reviews now have an optional tagline and a new UX
• Changed: Reviews will now show reviews from other users on the server, if they've opted-in.
• Changed: Tweaked the wording on registration page to ensure users understand email is required but does not need to be valid.
• Changed: Changed how enums show in the documentation so you can see both their name and value.
• Changed: JWTs will expire after 10 days due to the nature of how user's read content and devices sleep
• Changed: Many images were optimized and added to response compression
• Changed: Edit Series modal name field should be readonly as it is directly mapped to file metadata or filename parsed. It shouldn't be changeable via the UI.
• Changed: Made all UI components to be standalone, which results in slightly faster load times across the app
• Changed: Switched how we cound words in epub to handle languages that don't have spaces.
• Changed: Aligned a few apis to use default pagination, allowing for a small optimization.
• Changed: Changed how Kavita creates cover images to force the aspect ratio and prevent skewing, when comics or webtoons have non-standard ratios. You will need to regenerate all covers for it to take effect.
• Changed: Optimized aspect ratios for custom library images to avoid shift layout.
• Changed: Moved the series detail page down a bit to be inline with first row of actionables.
• Changed: Refactored the code to not throw generic 500 toasts on the UI and instead only specific errors will show
• Changed: Updated ExCss, which helps inline styles on books. Much more styles are now supported for inlining from css3 spec.
• Changed: Donation link will now be removed if the server admin has an active subscription license.
• Changed: Collection detail page will now default sort by sort name
• Changed: When performing a scan series, force a recount of words/pages to ensure read time gets updated.
• Changed: Sped up the query for getting libraries and added caching for that api, which is helpful for users with larger library counts.

Fixed

• Fixed: Fixed a bug where updating the user's last active time wasn't writing to database and causing a logout event
• Fixed: Fixed some errors on bad opds url generation and improved it further to use host name if set.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where weblinks with a comma in it, wouldn't be addable
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where trying to extract png favicon from a web link would skip valid pngs.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where a series trying to choose the first cover image wouldn't work reliably
• Fixed: Fixed a UI only issue where it would look like duplicate series were recently added when they weren't
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where IP Addresses was not called out in settings, which needs a restart to take effect.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where chapters within a volume could be unordered in the UI info screen.
• Fixed: Fixed a bunch of blank space on reading list detail page
• Fixed: Fixed yet another edge case for getting series cover image where first volume is higher than 1 and the rest is just loose leaf chapters.
• Fixed: Fixed a small css issue where the border to the tab wouldn't respect the border radius
• Fixed: Fixed a long standing bug where series and volume covers could blank out after a conversion task. This should no longer happen.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue in the epub reader where html tags within an anchor could break the navigation code for inner-links.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug in GetContinueChapter where a special could appear ahead of a loose leaf chapter.
• Fixed: Fixed an edge case bug for picking the correct cover image for a series.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where typeahead x wouldn't clear out the input field.
• Fixed: Don't allow duplicates for reading list characters.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when calculating recently updated, series with the same name but different libraries could get grouped.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue with fit to height where there could still be a small amount of scroll due to a timing issue with the image loading.
• Fixed: Fixed inability to progress to next chapter when last page is a spread and the user is using split rendering
• Fixed: Fixed grid breakpoint css variables not using the ones from variables due to a missing import.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where when switching from webtoon back to a non-webtoon reading mode, if the browser size isn't large enough for double, the reader wouldn't go to single mode.
• Fixed: Fixed a bug with arrow on sortable table header
• Fixed: Fixed an issue with epub column layout cutting off text
• Fixed: Fixed a bug where there is a little bit of space under fit to height in manga reader
• Fixed: Fixed an issue in directory picker where if you had two folders with the same name, the 2nd to last wouldn't be clickable.
• Fixed: Fixed an issue where a series with only tags would show See More, but there wouldn't be anything more to see