Ask HN: Where do you guys find audiobooks? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you guys find audiobooks?

30 pointsniksmac62 comments

In the process of digital detox, I am able to acquire a used iPod. Trying to find good quality downloadable audiobooks for me. I have some luck with using some torrents, but not enough audiobooks are there, at lease the genre I am interested in. What are your sources? How do you get them?

TA.

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Don't forget to check out Libby. Plug in your library card and you can check out audiobooks for free.

I purchase my audiobooks from libro.fm. It’s like Audible where you subscribe and get a credit every month, but part of the profit goes to support local book stores, and the books are DRM free.

This right here. The ability to download actual MP3s from books you’ve purchased is a miracle in 2025. Plus, sending some change to your local bookstore is better than sending it to Amazon.

100%. My workflow is purchase DRM free audiobooks from libro.fm, put it in my selfhosted audiobookshelf folder, and listen anywhere. Libby is a first choice actually as well if you have a library card.

libro.fm is great. I happily subscribe to them because it's all so effortless.

Probably worth noting as an aside that bookshop.org is sometimes mentioned as a libro.fm-like Amazon alternative for ebooks (NOT audiobooks), but my brief experiment with them was awful: they were much, much more restrictive than even Amazon, at least before Amazon's removal of file download.

If you want to sail the high seas, MyAnonaMouse is one of the best private trackers.

If you want a public tracker, I’ve heard good things about Audiobookbay

I was going to post this - I just joined this week, but have a friend who has sourced audiobooks from it that I couldn't find any other way so it looks good so far. Their emphasis on friendliness is nice too and seems genuine.

I've also heared good things of this island called Audiobookbay (and there's also this useful service called Bugmenot where you can find all sorts of login credentials...)

And even if it's a bit of a hassle, I always check if there is an option to buy books/audiobooks as directly as possible from the author (in some cases you can buy content directly on the author's website, for example).

BBC Radio 4 has a number of audiobooks online. Here are a couple from Agatha Christie:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007vqm2/episodes/player

My observation is that even though it's BBC "radio," the stuff on Radio 4 is more like an audio book, compared to American radio dramas which are more like "plays," as they're more acted out and can include sound effects and music. The BBC stuff is very dry, like someone reading to you.

If you want an equivalent digital news detox, see what reading services for the blind are available in your area. Where I live, one of the local NPR radio stations carries audio of someone reading today's newspaper, and it's also available online.

I used to get them from Audible and my collection has more than 400 audiobooks. However, I realized that I rarely listen to a book twice so buying audiobooks wasn't the best use of my money. Then I discovered Libby and Hoopla thanks to HN. Now I borrow audiobooks from my city library.

I made a telegram bot for my mother that downloads yt videos and extracts the audio and makes it available to her via jellyfin from my homeserver. She downloaded way over 1tb in a year.

Once every few month I transfer everything to an SD kart and hand it to her.

So: youtube is pretty full of audiobooks also very recent ones - and shes only searching for german ones.

I’m jealous, I wish my mum was into tech more so I could build stuff for her. But she’s a luddite :) Good for you.

if your mum can use netflix, she can use jellyfin.

She doesn't use Netflix. Probably could if she learned but doesn't think she can.

It was not a short way to get her there.

I tried a web interface before among other thigs. The telegram bot is perfectly fine because she can just use the share button on youtube on her mobile.

If the bot receives a message specifically from her, it is stored in a special folder in Jellyfin, and jf displays the recent added tracks.

She spent the last few days and weeks sorting 500+ GB of audiobooks onto an external SSD she bought on my recommendation.

I give lots of tech support, but I try to do it in a way that she gets something out of it so I have to spend less work later.

I haven't been able to get her to use ChatGPT so far, but I will eventually.

She used my telegram bot so much that I rewrote the original software (1) to something better (2) (that I can use regulary as well). The second iteration supports mqtt and magic wormhole and sends wormhole codes back to the sender after downloading. It was a bit much for her, she never used wormhole but I do.

1: https://gist.github.com/entropie/d265e94136b9777cc6b3190189b...

2: https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt

Perhaps an interesting thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1ehcqc1/anna...

Where I am, the local library is the best place. They quite a bit of these.

I try to support writers directly. eg. You can purchase Paul Millerd's Pathless path on his gumroad page and it comes with both the ebook and audiobook: https://pathless.gumroad.com/l/pathlesspath

Tanbooks also sells mp3s of their audiobooks directly on their website. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle changed my life profoundly for the better. https://tanbooks.com

As others have said, try Libby and Hoopla through your local library.

But I'll also go out on a limb and suggest that, for a "digital detox", you should read physical books instead.

I download epub files and then have ElevenLabs read it to me using AI generated voices I created/cloned using its built in tool. I prefer this method because I can have a book narrated to me using any voice I want to. For example, I’m currently listening to the foundation novels but having it narrated by an AI clone of Lou Lobell’s voice since she narrates the tv show. You can also export narrations as mp3 files and listen to them however you want.

Where do you get DRM-free epub files?

Perhaps not what you're looking for but there's plenty worth reading here for me: https://standardebooks.org/

I pirate books that I own physical copies of or find them on archive.org.

What is the average cost of using elevenlabs for that? they have great voices, but I would have assumed this would have been cost prohibitive.

If you do it through their iOS app it's completely free.

I pay $22 for the unlimited subscription which allows me to generate more audio narration than I can reasonably listen to in 1 month.

I've been finding some great books from Librivox. They have a great copy of Crime and Punishment https://booksearch.party/books/Crime_and_Punishment.html

Like others mentioned, your library + Libby is a great resource, especially if you're in a major metro. I moved away from a major metro and kind of miss how rich the selection for materials was (I was spoiled!). It's not bad where I'm at now, but any major city should have a great selection, and using Libby is easy.

Libby: Source is local library Spotify Premium: You get a certain number of free hours per month BBC Sounds: Worst app of the lot, but they do have audio books

I wish all of these apps implemented a "Default Sleep Mode" between, say, 10pm and 7am so if you press play it defaults to only playing for 30 mins. Podcast Republic has this.

IIUC you’re asking for a sleep timer? If so, built-in timer on iOS can “stop playing” instead of an alarm sound. Not sure about Android.

The sleep timer works OK as you fall asleep. If I wake up again in the night I need to fiddle about with my phone to reset the sleep timer to use it again, which wakes me up further.

I would rather it just assume that it would stop playing after 30mins, if I ever play anything at night.

I listen to a ton of audiobooks on oreilly which I have a subscription to from work.

Downpour, most audiobooks are drm free and they have an audible-like subscription thing.

If you want to go with public domain books in audio, here's a place for books read by volunteers https://librivox.org/

One suggestion that hasn't been mentioned yet is YouTube. Sometimes even books that don't have an official audiobook recording might have a random video of someone reading it.

Audiobookbay to get the torrent infohash.

VLC for listening on and copying to mobile.

I highly recommend "Blinkist". It is an app with only audio book summaries and written summaries. It was a key step in my successful digital detox. The fact that they were summaries was easier do create daily habits.

Tip: In your digital detox, I also highly recommend an app like "Freedom" to block your time wasters. It's a bit like parental control but for yourself to timebox time spent on the news or HN.

Note: This won't help you personally but expect to help HN readers in general.

Tangentially related, but can anyone suggest an alternative to goodreads for discovering new audiobooks based of my past ratings?

Ask in the subreddit of the genre? Those are some of the more mature subs usually.

Reddit shouldn't be included in anyone's digital detox.

GP didn't state they were detoxing they asked for book recs. One or two reddit posts shouldn't send them into the doomscrolling abyss.

No they didn't?

I hear good things about https://joinfediverse.wiki/BookWyrm but I’m not sure it’s a drop in replacement for Goodreads.

I use Goodreads to track what I’ve read/listened to and my ratings, and then I dump it into LLM chat and ask for more recs. It’s not perfect but I get better recs than Goodreads itself.

libgen > open .epub in EPUBReader extension in Edge browser > Read Aloud This Page (Microsoft Steffan Online Natural voice, Speed at max) . "Keep Awake" extension prevents laptop from sleeping. Bluetooth headphones let me walk around the room. It's not ideal for things like bike rides but otherwise it works well for me.

Spotify has a bunch included

What kind of iPod? A classic iPod or an iOS-based iPod?

My local library's network uses Hoopla.

archive org. Look for the audiobook "Mawson's Will: The Greatest Survival Story Ever Told"

Audible, but your library might have them too.

Don't use torrents. That's cheap. Pay authors, just like you expect to be paid for your work.

> Audible

> Pay authors

Personally, because I also care about fair business practices, I avoid anything Amazon.

Not many people seem to feel the same about spotify which is a shame. Pretty bad at paying artists.

Sure, but you can buy audiobooks from elsewhere. It’s up to you.

That's funny, because isn't Amazon the worst place for authors to get paid for their work?

Depends, but for traditional publishing the royalty percentage is exactly the same because it's the publisher paying a % of the sale price. Amazon might discount more heavily (but then so do other large retailers). But they also provide more volume.

Audible

Even if they are using an iOS-based iPod, Audible will not run. Audible requires iOS 17.0 or newer, which was never released for iPod.

You can "rip" books you "buy" from Audible if you want them on a device that doesn't support Audible or is otherwise mainly offline.

Is this still possible? I’d love to move some of my audiobooks to an offline device but I struggled to find a way to do this.

I used https://openaudible.org/

I use Libation for this https://getlibation.com/

Library

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