Hi all, I’m relatively new to this whole self-hosting thing and I have been loving it. I have several instances setup on my Debian server except for an audiobooks one. My wife loves audiobooks and asked me a way she can get audiobooks on the fly. I have searched online and found many.
Audiobookshelf is the most recommended one, but I don’t really know much about it beside what I read. Most of it I didn’t understand since I’ve never set up anything like that before. I don’t know the technical details on audiobooks like I do on music for example. So I’m not sure. Audiobookshelf has an app for iOS in test flight but its beta is full. And every client for it has an “in-app purchase” tag and I’m not sure what they hide behind a paywall. I’ve also read that Navidrome (which I already have set up on the sever) works, too but it needs to be “tagged” correctly. I’m not sure how to and what to use to tag audiobooks. I use kid3 for music, would it work for books, too?
I don’t want to commit and go through the whole setup then end up hitting roadblocks. So any info would be very much appreciated.
Thank you all.


I did setup Audiobookshelf via normal apt in the command line. I also have docker for other things, but this time I wanted to try things the normal way to see. It wasn’t bad. It created a config file that has two lines in /etc and I just created a folder in /srv and and dumped the files there and pointed the client to it. Still experimenting with it and a client app called “Audiobooth”. Not bad so far.
Nice, it sounds like you’re learning stuff just fine. I recommended it elsewhere in the comments here but if you’re looking for audiobook sources I suggest checking out libro.fm. They give half of your purchase price to a local bookstore of your choice and you can download the files in multiple formats with no DRM.
I’ll leave that part for the wife to take care since she’s the one who does audiobooks. I can’t. I will never be able to actually listen to an audiobook no matter how much I try. I don’t know if it’s my ADHD or what, but I just can’t focus.
Haha I get that. I was the same way for a long time but gave them another shot a year or so ago and now I’m hooked. They are so much more convenient than physical books