michaelellis003/paperboy

Paperboy is a tool that connects Claude to your e-reader so you can ask for research papers or books and have them sent straight to a device like a Kindle or Kobo. It works as an MCP server, which means it is a small program that runs on your computer or in the cloud and gives Claude a set of tools it can call during a conversation. Zotero, a reference management program, acts as the source of truth for what you own and have read. The tool separates two ideas: getting a paper onto your e-reader, and keeping a record of it in your library. You can do either one without the other, so a paywalled paper or a book you already own can be tracked in Zotero without ever being sent anywhere. You can ask Claude to search for papers by topic, arxiv ID, DOI, or title, and it will find candidates using services like OpenAlex, arXiv, and Semantic Scholar. Papers can be sent immediately, or added to a reading queue that lives inside a Zotero collection, and once something is sent it gets tagged so it is not sent again by accident. Claude can also help sort papers into topic based collections inside Zotero, and can catalogue full books using their ISBN or title, though books are only recorded, not delivered to a device. Sending papers to a device happens either through email, which works for Kindle and similar readers with an email address, or through Dropbox for Kobo devices, since Kobo syncs from a specific Dropbox folder. Setup is handled through an interactive wizard that asks which device you use and only requests the credentials that device actually needs, checking each one as you go. The project can also be deployed to the cloud using Google Cloud Run so that it works from a phone or the regular Claude website, not just on your own computer. Anyone given the resulting URL and a security token can use the deployment as if they were its owner, so that link should be treated like a password. The project is released under the MIT license.