Having been blogging for over 20 years, there are some topics I keep going back to somewhat regularly. One of these is audiobooks, something I’ve been hooked up on ever since my hospitalization, and that I still to this day commute, and fall asleep, with.
Like many other audiobook aficionados, I have a love-hate relationship with Audible — because if on one side it has a vast catalogue that is fairly accessible for its monthly due, their content is locked down hard, and you need to keep using your account to access it even after you (supposedly) bought it. As it turns out, this is only one of the reasons I hate Audible, and the other one is a bit more… complicated.
You see, I started reading Audible audiobooks when I owned an iPod Classic, which meant I bought my first one on the iTunes Store — and that meant they were DRM’d with a whole different method than Audible’s own. It also meant some of those I could more easily “liberate” and are still accessible to me some 14 years later, despite not owning a single Apple device anymore.
When I moved from an Apple-heavy ecosystem to owning an Android phone, I also decided to switch from buying those audiobooks on the iTunes Store, to buying them from Audible directly — it did help that at that point, you could still buy them from Audible and download them to your iPod; I do not remember just when they dropped that feature, but then again, iPods dithered into nothingness as iPhone took more of a center stage.
But at the time, neither Italy nor Ireland had their own Audible storefront, which meant that in both cases, my Audible subscription was with Audible dot-com, the USA storefront. I bought a whole lot of books over the years on that storefront! But when I moved to the London, for me to be able to pay in Pound Sterling, I had to switch to Audible dot-co-dot-uk, which has a different storefront. And the Audible app can only be logged into one storefront at a time. Which means that either I have access to my new books, or to my old books, but the two will never be combined. Reminds you of anything?
Now, there’s alternatives: libro.fm has its own membership, and while it doesn’t have as wide a catalogue as Audible (in particular it seems to lack BBC Radio 4 dramas), I have been eyeing switching to it for a while, but I have been underwhelmed with most of the Audiobooks apps I tried on Android, and Calibre hasn’t been holding up as a way to organize audiobooks.
But recently, in a frenzy of throwing everything I could at finding a way to organize more of my personal collections, I discovered Audiobookshelf! Though to be honest I discovered it while looking for a way to handle podcasts.
Aside: the reason why I went looking for a way to handle podcasts with a self-hosted web app is because the podcast client I have been using (AntennaPod) has no apparent way to backup the downloaded episodes – not in bulk at least – and my previous method to back those up, through Solid Explorer, stopped working as Android appears to have further locked down cross-apps data access. Conspiracy theorists would suggest that they’re doing this to block DRM liberation, I personally can see the security implications and while I’m incredibly annoyed about my broken workflow, I can see why this is happening.
While I find some of the implementation decisions around the software a bit odd, and not what I would do myself, I have to admit that setting it up was quite easy, and I’m now quite happy with the way it works out both in terms of collection handling, and streaming to my phone — no more filling up the phone with most of my sleep collection, since I can have it stream from the NAS, at least while I’m at home on the same network. I’m not going to comment on the… uh… not quite shared values exuded by the choice of items on the bookshelf on their homepage!
This is set up in an almost identical way as I set up Paperless NGX and Navidrome: the actual data (audiobooks) is stored on the NAS, which means I can add books to the library through a simple Samba share. That data is then shared with the usual VM via NFS on a host-only network, and the same reverse proxy has a new hostname for running Audiobookshelf itself.
It supports pretty much everything I need, and even solves the annoyingly old problem of building a single (M4B) file out of per-chapter mp3s, which are common for DRM-free audiobooks! The only thing I could still wish for if I wanted to find something unsolved, is a Matroska+Opus alternative to M4B — because I’d actually would love to see more viable fully open formats, even though I have effectively dropped off that part of the Free Software community over the past seven years or so.
So I guess I’m fairly happy I have now scratched this one itch in such a way that I don’t think I’ll need to worry about for quite a while longer. Actually two itches, because now I also have a way to keep my Podcast subscriptions all in one place and I can go ahead and bundle up long-running podcasts into year- or season-based M4Bs if I want to access them more easily when I’m not at home.
Now the problems that remain are deciding what to do with the large collections of audiobooks bought from Audible and (surprisingly) Google Play Books. I guess I can by now consume up my existing credits and stop paying further for the membership, focusing on buying new audiobooks from Libro.fm and keep them organized in Audiobookshelf. But short of finding ways around it, it doesn’t sound like I’ll be able to listen to some of my favourite radio series without spending quite a pretty penny on getting the CD releases — something like Cabin Pressure would be exceedingly expensive, as each season is in the £20 range, and it doesn’t look like it ever got a full collection release on CD, even though an Audible “A-to-Z” release was indeed available.
Worse yet, Google Play Books doesn’t even have a way to let you download the DRM’d files of the audiobooks you purchased! Which means even accepting to breach ToS to liberate those files, you’re pretty much stuck with no option, and if Google decides to kill the Play Books service, well, sucks to be you I guess. It doesn’t look like they would be in a hurry to do that, but given how the rest of the Play suite of software is turning out, I’m not entirely sure what the situation there is.
For those wondering why someone who cares about Audiobooks even has any of them on Play Books – possibly the worst platform in terms of feature, availability, and usability of its app – the answer is that I had signed up for “dogfooding” the product before it was launched. You can probably thank me in particular if the Play Books store shows the narrator of audiobooks before you purchase them!