In the current day and age moving from Amazon is not unappealing. I wish that Audible.com had never been bought by Amazon because I love Audible but hate what Amazon represents. It represents a monopolisation of the way people shop and by content around the world. Luckily in Switzerland we have Galaxus as a practical alternative.
For several months, by now, I have migrated all of my books from Audible.com to Audiobookshelf via Openaudible.
Two or three days ago I noticed that I have spent at least sixteen thousand three hundred and fifty seven minutes listening to 320 items over 214 days via Audiobookshelf and I can honestly say that of my self hosted experiments this is my favourite.
What I Like What I like about Audiobookshelf is that it gives me the opportunity to find podcasts I like, add them, download every episode and then slowly make my way through them.
Yesterday I shifted my data and setup from the Pi5 8gb to the Pi5 4gb with relative ease. I rsynched the data from one Pi to the other, brought up the docker containers, checked that they were working before shutting down the other Pi. I then swapped the 8gb Pi with the four gb pi and turned on the four gb Pi, after plugging the hard drive that I use to store photos and audiobooks and podcasts.
As I write this I am waiting for my Apple Laptop to complete two tasks. The first task is to convert all my audible books from AAX to MP3 format. This is taking days to complete because I have over 500 books and my mac book pro is slow, due to it being from 2016.
Very Slow Time Machine I’m also waiting for my mac book pro to backup to a one terabyte external HD, before repurposing a one terabyte SSD.
I have been an audible member for years at this point and in that time I have “bought” hundreds of books. I write “bought” because I payed for a Platinum account for years and got credits and got the books with those credits. Over the years I have collected more books than I can read in a year.
That library lived in the cloud, rather than my devices, for years. I would download the books I was listening to but not those that I had finished, or would read later.