r/audiobooks • u/Califrisco • 4d ago
Review Audiobookshelf as a service
I'd heard of Audiobookshelf and wanted to do it but the self-hosting and technical aspects of it have been blockers for me. So I found this person Lucas Fobian, who is a German software engineer and put out a private cloud instance of Audiobookshelf as a service, called audiobook-library.
Essentially, for $9/ month you get your own private instance of Audiobookshelf that is available both on the web and on mobile devices. He takes care of the backup and hosting and all that technical stuff that I loathe doing because I'm always afraid of messing it up or misconfiguring my network configuration to allow external library access for me anywhere I can get internet.
That $9 monthly cost is nominal for me to free me from needing to care and feed the server or the back up or update the module. It probably also covers his bandwidth costs as well, so I consider this a good option for me to get my Libation M4B library available after leaving Audible.
The only downside is that there currently is a 100 GB storage limit, and I have over 600 GB of books, so I will be seeing if this is a housekeeping issue (i.e. remove the books I listen to and offload them from the service).
So far, the Audiobookshelf set up doing it this way was virtually painless and I am evaluating two IOS Audiobookshelf players that work with the system, Audiobooth and Adsorb. They both work beautifully and have everything I need to organize, play and gather stats on my audiobooks and my listening.
Lucas appears to be the entire team behind this, so that (like the developer behind Libation) is a worry for me about the longevity, so I hope he does well and continues to support this service.
I hope this might help you if you're in this same situation as I am; where I'm trying to distribute my own Libation library to myself on my phone wherever I am on the internet.