Hacker News Reader

Comment by manmal | Hacker News Reader

In case you‘re into audiobooks, I suggest to check out Bookcamp too. I guess Plexamp works for that as well, but Bookcamp is just like Audible in a way.

View on HN

For anyone who's game to run another service for audiobooks, I've found Audiobookshelf to be pretty good: https://github.com/advplyr/audiobookshelf

I love ABS but I use it mainly for podcasts since it downloads each episode to my server which I then stream from. It’s awesome. My only gripe is the iOS app, which is a pretty slow webapp wrapper.

I would suggest you give some of the alternative iOS apps a try.

-plappa

-ShelfPlayer

I haven't used it, but couldn't you serve them out via RSS and consume with Apple Podcasts, Pocketcasts, etc?

I second the other suggestion for Prologue on iOS as a Plex frontend for audio books. It’s such a good experience that I’m now listening to more audio books than before and they also just launched an Apple Watch version.

Seconded! (Or thirded?) Prologue is so much better than Audible. I’m using Libation to liberate my copy protected audiobooks, not to share them but to avoid that godawful Audible app

> not to share them but to avoid that godawful Audible app

It’s sad how true that is for many things these days. I usually download shows to have them in Plex even though I have many paid streaming accounts. Just because it’s a better UX and it also automatically scrobbles to Trakt.tv.

> I’m using Libation to liberate my copy protected audiobooks

Interesting, I'm going to have to check this out. I've been using OpenAudible for this purpose (paid).

Prologue on iOS is an Audible-like experience with a Plex back end as well!

The biggest hurdle I've run into when trying to manage an audiobook library with Plex is the metadata source. There are a few plugins that try and gather from Audible, I assume by scraping, but it's always minimal and very flaky. I haven't revisited this for a while now though, so hopefully things have improved - I would love to start archiving my Audible collection.

Bookcamp has fairly negative reviews on the App Store.

Have you had issues with it?

I've noticed that in general, a lot of selfhosted-adjacent apps tend to get negative reviews. Without having looked at bookcamp specifically, I've noticed that a lot of times, it's because those apps require a minimum level of competence from their users, and those users that miss the threshold generally leave negative reviews.

No issues whatsoever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com