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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.

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[-] shads@lemy.lol 14 points 7 months ago

Audiobookshelf is fantastic, however if you aren't ready to self host I would have a long think about if you want to start pulling that thread.

We are not IOS users so can't comment on client software but the experience on Android is pretty good.

Got my wife set up and a few titles from Librivox for her to stream while driving across my home state for work and she essentially jumped from Google Play Books to Audiobookshelf without missing a beat, saved us a lot of money on a voice she largely ignores to help her focus.

[-] DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago

I SelfHosted a buncha things. I’ve been working on moving away from big tech for a while now. Set up ABS to experiment with it and it’s been nice so far. Found a decent iOS client that is FOSS. It’s called Audiobooth. Wife is the iOS user, I’m a user of both iOS and Android.

this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
54 points (98.2% liked)

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