michaelellis003/paperboy

An MCP server that delivers research papers and books to your e-reader,
with Zotero as the source of truth. Ask Claude for a reading list, then
say "queue them and send to my Kindle." (MCP is the plugin protocol
Claude uses: this program runs on your machine or your cloud project,
and Claude calls its tools during conversation.) Works locally in Claude
Code and Claude Desktop; a Cloud Run deployment adds claude.ai and the
Claude mobile app, so papers can be sent from a phone
(docs/deploy.md).
Two things are kept separate: **delivering** a paper to your device and
**cataloguing** a work in Zotero. You can do either. A book you own, a
paywalled reference, or a PDF you already have can all be tracked in the
library without being staged for the e-reader.
Zotero itself is optional: without it you can still search and send
papers one-off. The reading queue, collections, and duplicate
protection across sessions need it.
How it works
You ask Claude for papers; it uses paperboy's tools to find, queue, and
deliver them. What that looks like in practice:
- Papers you queue land in a **Reading Queue** collection in Zotero,
created on demand.
- Once a paper reaches your device, paperboy tags it sent-to-ereader
in Zotero, so it skips papers already sent to your e-reader, even in
a later conversation. (Without Zotero there's no memory between
sends, so this protection needs it.)
- Claude can file papers into your topical collections too. It proposes
one from the paper's topic and your existing collection names, and
asks you when the fit is unclear. A paper can sit in several
collections at once, so filing never disturbs the queue.
- Papers are found by arXiv id, DOI, or title (a close-enough title
match, so a reading list Claude wrote in the chat can be sent as-is).
When a title matches only loosely, paperboy offers the closest
candidate to confirm rather than guessing or failing silently.
- Books work too: add_book resolves an ISBN, a book DOI, or a title
into a proper Zotero **book** item (publisher, edition, ISBN, pages).
Books are catalogued, not delivered.
- Have the PDF already (a working paper, lecture notes, an open-access
textbook)? attach_pdf files it in Zotero with the PDF attached,
using metadata you give it, and can send it to the e-reader in the
same step.
- When a reference can't be resolved, the receipt says *why* and which
tool fits, rather than sending you hunting for a better URL. A paper
with no open-access PDF is a normal library record, not an error.
Zotero holds all of this, so the server keeps no state of its own: no
database to run, and safe to redeploy at any time.
Delivery backends
| Backend | Devices | How |
|---|---|---|
| email (default) | Kindle, PocketBook, anything with an email intake | SMTP to the device address. Kindle constraints enforced: 25 attachments / 50 MB per email; sender must be on the Approved Personal Document E-mail List |
| dropbox | Kobo (native Dropbox sync on the device) | Uploads via the Dropbox API. Kobo only syncs Apps/Rakuten Kobo/, so use a **Full Dropbox**-scoped app with DROPBOX_FOLDER="/Apps/Rakuten Kobo"; an App-folder-scoped app can't reach it |
Tools
| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| search_papers | Search OpenAlex (general) or arXiv (source="arxiv"); results carry a ref and an open_access_pdf flag |
| recommend_papers | Discover related or new papers: citation-graph recommendations (Semantic Scholar) seeded from your Zotero library, plus keyword discovery from interests Claude distills out of the conversation. Excludes papers you already have |
| send_papers | One-off send by arXiv id, DOI, URL, or title (also records in Zotero if configured) |
| queue_papers | Add papers to the Zotero Reading Queue without sending (optionally filed into topical collections) |