fkr - exploration is key to excellence

I’ve been meaning to dodge audible for ages. I’ve stopped ordering stuff from Amazon years ago, but leaving audible was more of a hurdle. I really like audiobooks. Furthermore, I like reading, but I also enjoy listening to certain books. Some books I have for reading as well, as listening. I’ve been on Audible for a long time. As such, in my catalog there was fairly large. Leaving audible does not only imply that I have to make sure to not throw away all the audiobooks, but also that I want to have some comfortable way of listening to audiobooks in the future: my existing ones as well as new ones that I purchase.

Replacing audible — where to buy from instead?

A while ago, I came across Libro.fm. Libro.fm is not just an audible alternative but is actually an excellent way to purchase audiobooks. When creating an account with Libro.fm, one can configure a local bookstore that should receive compensation when purchases are done through Libro.fm. When purchasing an audiobook through Libro.fm one actually owns the files, so that Libro.fm directly offers to download the corresponding files. Libro.fm does offer an iOS and Android app as well.

Exiting audible — downloading all content

There are various ways to retrieve audible content. One good way is to use Libation. While it is not the most intuitive software, it will work through your collection just fine.

Easy cross-device listening

While Libro.fm comes with an iOS and Android app, this does not do the job for me, since I want to access all the old audiobooks as well. Ideally, I can access all my audiobooks through the same app. Well, thankfully, there is a bunch of self-hosting servers for media content. First I looked at ampache to Address music as well as audiobooks — however, the support for audiobooks in ampache is fairly limited. Then I discovered audiobookshelf. As the name suggests, audiobookshelf addresses audiobooks (well, and to some extent podcasts) and only audiobooks. Which suits me well: Do one thing and do this excellent. ;)

According to this page the audiobookshelf people are working on an official app. The app just as audiobookshelf itself are open source licensed under the GPL-3.

Aside from the official app, there are other apps out there for iOS as well as Android. For Android, there is even Lissen in F-Droid. On iOS, there is plappa.

Since the testflight beta is full, I had no chance of testing the official iOS app and went with plappa for now. On my (iodeos-based) Fairphone I went with Lissen from F-Droid for now.

The documentation is good, so that there is no need to reproduce it here with smart comments ;) Nevertheless a few hints on how I run it: I run it from docker and made sure to have /metadata as well as /config mounted from the host. That way these can easily be backed up. Audiobookshelf never touches the original audio files but instead saves any metadata alongside (either below the metadata directory or if configured to do so next to the audiofiles).

F-Droid or not to F-Droid?

Apparently whether or not and how to get this into F-Droid has been a topic.