A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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+1 for audiobookshelf
I use it for audiobooks and podcasts.
Does it support ebooks? Never known.
Anyway I wouldn't use it for ebooks, better to use a dedicated reader. Even if they seems to be the same stuff (books) they really are not as one is pure audio and other pure text. Way different way to use them that I think no good reader supports both formats at once in a satisfactory way.
supports podcasts too? what tool are you using to download those? and does ABS handle the sorting/meta data the same way it does for audio books?
Yes, its plug and play easy peasy. Search and download directly inside abs
i assume that’s just for free podcasts?
Never tried with non free podcasts...
Maybe if you can specify authentication in the URL it can work? Or you manually upload them.
Audiobookshelf for sure. It handles audiobooks fabulously, and it also does handle ebooks.
I use it to manage my eBook library, but not as the reader. You can set up a "send to ereader" option to email the ebooks to your reader of choice. So I just shoot them off to my pocketbook ereader when I want to read one.
I use abs and it's great. My partner listens to audiobooks, I read ebooks. You just have them side by side in the library, and in the audiobookshelf android app you can choose between stream or read. You also don't need to store them side by side, the metadata can put them together clientside anyway. I guess this would be the way to go if you thought you might try a diff ebook hosting service later.
If all you do with your ebooks is read them, I daresay you'll have no issues because I haven't. Supports volume controls for page turn and that's all that I want.
Thanks, this is really helpful! Do you use the same app for both? Is it the abs client or something else?
I use the Audiobookshelf app from AdvPlyr on the play store. I've been meaning to try Lissen since it's on F-Droid, but I tried this to make sure my partner didn't have any issues.
If I'm using it on my PC I just connect to the web UI.
I connect on all my devices with tailscale. My partner uses the same but has apparently been having issues with her phone not being able to access the tailnet when not on the same LAN. It's not so bad though, the Audiobookshelf app lets her download her books. This works better anyway, since she travels for work and often has no service anyway.
Re tailscale: not sure if it is a technical issue or not, but my wife found it helpful when I added a toggle to the Quick Settings menu, which shows when it is running and can restart it with one tap.
Oh! Appreciate the tip. I'll investigate this weekend
I ended up spinning up audiobookshelf. It's fine for audiobooks, and I immediately installed Lissen (alongside ABS) and it is clearly preferable to me.
Lissen does not recognize ebooks at all, and I also didn't have success with the comic book I tested on the ABS client, so I may try another service for those. For now audiobooks are the higher priority and I am very happy with those. Thanks for the input - I really appreciate it.
No worries! I've used the calibre app for ebooks in the past and it does quite well.
I think specific solutions for each type of content would be better in the long term if you have a lot of stuff to host, and management/organization will be better since they are catered to whatever the content type is.
Others have already said it, Audiobookshelf is a good one. For EBooks though, I would highly recommend Calibre Content server. Calibre is pretty much the defacto open source EBook manager out there, a lot of features and abilities specific to ereaders and ebooks of all formats.
There is little better for ebooks than Calibre, and Calibre Web if you're into web apps.
For the audio book discussion, OP should use the "search" function, because there was a robust discussion about this in @[email protected] within the past two months.
I think youre linking to a user instead of a channel but could be wrong. When i tried to access in Voyager it told me the user didnt exist.
Oh. Yeah, probably. I can never remember how Lemmy does communities; with a bang, maybe?
I wish the OSS communities would get together and pick a lane. Matrix uses #room:server, Lemmy does !community@server; does Mastodon use the same as Lemmy?
Standards, people. Let's have some standards. Shame on whoever designed their protocol second.
For me, AudioBookShelf is the clear standout for audio books, and I ended up going with Kavita for ebooks.
Can I ask what stands out with Kavita that audiobookshelf lacks?
Audiobookshelf has very basic support for ebooks but it doesn't compare to specialised software. Kavita has better management, and it comes with a built-in OPDS server so you can use any ebook app that supports that. I also don't know if Audiobookshelf can actually be used for ebooks without having it as an audiobook as well, never tried it.
Audiobookshelf for audiobooks, calibre-web for ebooks. Don't try to get it to get one thing that does both well, you're better off with two solutions that are both better at their respective thing.
I've read some places that Calibre can be finicky. Have you had to troubleshoot any issues with your deployment?
Calibre is finicky (and I hate the current docker deployment option), but I Calibre-Web is not, and a totally different project. It's worth taking a look.
Since they're different applications entirely and you wouldn't use the same client for each, I use Calibre as a kasmweb docker image for ebooks and enable OPDS for it to hook up with my FBreader app. Audiobooks are done with Audiobookshelf and outputs an RSS feed for Antennapod subscription.
I currently use antenna pod for listening to podcasts and I love it. Am I understanding correctly that you also use it for audiobooks? Does show each chapter as a separate episode or how does that work?
https://www.audiobookshelf.org/guides/rss_feeds/
So set the books up in a collection, and add each book. RSS the collection and each book shows up as an episode. I wouldn't want chapters as episodes, that would be annoying usually.
Agreed, these are two different things meant for two different purposes. At this point nothing beats audiobookshelf
I just learned about it recently, and it looks really awesome. It does ebooks, audio, and both. It's main feature is that you can read along with the audio, and it will highlight sentences as the audio goes.
Looks very cool! I don't know that I have the resources for it on my little homelab but good to keep it in mind in the future.
Audiobookshelf is insanely good. It's almost a perfect application. Seemingly it does ebooks too, but I haven't used that yet.
Sounds like Jellfyfin+Jellybook is your winner then. The server portion of audiobook or ebook hosting isn't going to be giving you any game changing features. They serve files.
The client you use is going to make or break your experience here, so just go with the easiest setup on the server side, and then run through some clients to see what works best.
I have used audiobook shelf to read a couple of PDF files. Seemed to work fine. I mostly use it for audio books.