Carta Plus shares the same feature as Carta except that it stores app information on the cloud. It allows users to maintain the same bookshelf over different devices. Also some communal reading experience can be possible, such as in a classroom or bookclub situation.
As of April 2024, this app is banned and its store is shut down from Google Play due the violation of their Violent Extremism policy. This requires explanation for the current and future users of this app.
One of the features of this app is to allow users to freely navigate Internet Archive for their vast collection of audio materials using Android System WebView. Then the app automatically detects information about audiobooks on their pages so that users can bring those to their bookshelves.
What Google alleges is that certain audio materials, arabic language ones specifically, on the aforementioned Internet Archive are regarded as extremism propaganda. And by extension, this app is promoting extremism.
Despite apparent absurdity of their reasoning, subsequent appeal yields no result. And the author has no intention to remove the link to Internet Archive. Thus from the version 2.6 onward, this app will be released as apk format directly from this repository until better alternative is found.
Internet Archive is a true historian in the age of internet. Please consider supporting them and take time to think about how internet giants like Google and Facebook are shaping, thus inevitably distorting, our perception of reality.
In the near future it is likely that this app is replaced by another, which does not rely on any commercial cloud service (Firebase in this case) in favor of a self-hosted backend server. Keep in mind that in such occasion, you need to spin up your own server and migrate your data by yourself.
If you do not need communal reading experience, you probably do not need this app. Thus we highly encourage current users to switch to Carta.
The easiest way is to use Nextcloud. You can use run your own server or you can use one of the Nextcloud service prividers.
If you have a NAS, then you can spin up your WebDAV server using rclone or apache.
rclone serve webdav --addr :8080 --user username --pass password /var/www/webdav
/etc/apache2/ports.conf
Listen 80
# add port number of choice
Listen 8080
...
/etc/sites-available/your.domain.conf
DavLockDB /usr/local/share/apache2/DavLock
<VirtualHost *:8080>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/html
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
Alias /webdav /var/www/webdav
<Directory /var/www/webdav>
DAV On
AuthName "webdav"
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /usr/local/share/apache2/webdav-pass
Require valid-user
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
- password files
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/apache2
sudo htpasswd -c webdav-pass username
sudo chown www-data:www-data /usr/local/share/apache2/webdav-pass
- davloc directory
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/apache2/DavLock
sudo chown www-data:www-data /usr/local/share/apache2/DavLock
- modules
a2enmod auth_basic dav dav_fs
- site
a2ensite your.domain
systemctl restart apache2