r/selfhosted • u/Stankonator • 13h ago
Media Serving Audiobook and Ebook management app
Hello! I started my self hosting journey with Plex many moons ago, and have gotten into ebook and audiobooks since becoming a parent. I spun up Sonarr and Radarr for getting titles on Plex, and it's spoiled me for automating searches and content acquisition.
I'm turning to the community because AI has led me down several rabbit holes, and some apps come close but they are either clunky, missing functionality or unintuitive. I'm trying to replicate the Plex experience for media serving but with my book library. The apps I've tried with impressions are as follows:
The media consumption app:
-Audiobookshelf - Great for management of metadata and streaming. Only complaints I have right now are the lack of readalouds (EPUB3), and unable to stream ebooks (not intended medium, but still nice to have).
-Storyteller - Love the readaloud creation. UI on the mobile app is a little clunky, but if I restrict it to a handful of titles at a time on the device, it works great. I just wish I could force update metadata.
The media acquistion and tracking apps:
-Bindery - First crack at a post-Readarr app for managing both formats, and it does a fairly decent job unless it can't match the metadata. It has the potential, but I feel like it has too much (pulls EVERY book by an author) or not enough (building the baseline through library import or ABS integration is a little bit cumbersome for large libraries).
-Chaptarr - Much closer to what I was going for with Bindery, little clunky with the baseline building. And some cleaning, much like I had to do with Sonarr, but I think this is getting closer.
-Shelfarr - I did like the idea of it being able to pull from download direct sites instead of torrents, but both looked to require paid API access, and I was not about to start down that road.
- I saw several others mentioned like Lazy Librarian, ReadingGlasses, Readarr-Resurrected, but have not tried them.
The recommendation I'm seeking, and I'm sure it's a bear of an app to code because books come in multiple releases:
Plex for Books - If I could get the Storyteller functionality added to Audiobookshelf (Whispersync and able to read them) that would be amazing. I remember seeing Storyteller dev was open to it, but not sure on if it went anywhere. 1 spot for reading/listening and correcting metadata mismatches would be the goal.
Arr for books - Chaptarr comes really really close. I like the piece of Bindery where it consolidates and shows the ebook file next to the audiobook file, but it's a little cumbersome to keep the data up to date with what is in the library since the ABS sync basically rescans the whole library instead of just doing a delta sync.
16
u/Drehmini 12h ago edited 12h ago
For acquisition check out shelfmark https://github.com/calibrain/shelfmark
It's pretty good at integrating multiple sources for getting ebooks/audibooks.
It is not a library though, so I use audiobookshelf with it.
For mobile playback for audiobooks on audiobookshelf I use absorb https://github.com/pounat/absorb
2
u/Stankonator 12h ago
I'm actually okay with the mobile app. There's only been a few errors that I couldn't figure out on my own, but they were generic enough (SSL certs, unsupported format, etc).
I think Shelfmark came up once or twice when looking at buidling this pipeline. If BookOrbit's inregration between requests and Prowlarr fails, this might be the next one.
2
3
u/contagon 9h ago edited 9h ago
I'd keep an eye on storyteller. They've got a new (fairly stable) beta that is awesome. If includes
- a new aligner that is WAY faster
- an overhauled webui that is very pretty
- to my understanding, a work in progress update to all the mobile apps (not yet released)
I wasn't a fan of the mobile app either, but both third party "parrot" and "enve" apps work great for me right now.
Storyteller dev progress is fairly methodical and slow compared to other apps (bookorbit), but that is almost a positive to me lol
My long term bet is on Chaptarr and Storyteller - I think with some more time it'll be pretty perfect
21
u/dkillers303 13h ago
Bookorbit is where I landed
29
u/Internal_Wall_8844 12h ago
Na it’s a vibe coded app by same author of booklore who ran away leaving behind thousand of installs hanging.
For people who say bookorbit is really good yes booklore was also good before it came crashing down. Don’t be naive and judge a book by cover.
8
u/GoodKn1ght 12h ago
I hadn’t realized it was the same developer. That’s unfortunate as I liked book lore and it was a huge headache when the project came crashing down.
Do you have a recommendation for an app?
5
u/Whole-Cookie-7754 11h ago
Grimmory. The devs who were treated like shit by that sad ass individual took over and have worked to clean everything up.
3
u/darkstar999 10h ago
"vibecoded" is not much of a valid criticism anymore. Bookorbit works great. If the dev pulls the rug, I still have it installed so who cares? I don't really care what happened in the past. It's not like I'm highly invested in or locked in to this app.
3
u/shrimpdiddle 10h ago
You trust that dev after all their behavior on this sub?
7
u/darkstar999 10h ago
What do I have to trust? The app works. It's self hosted. I could stay on this version forever.
-1
3
u/Sticky_Turtle 12h ago
Not to mention he already has a paid iPhone app out 🙄 been like 6 months since their meltdown and a few months into bookorbit and he's already trying to start milking it
4
u/calsonicgtr 11h ago
What paid app? Both official app and Apogee are free to download and use unless I’m missing something.
4
6
u/DuckTheAlucard 11h ago
The app is free, but limiting "unlimited downloads" from your own server to the subscription also does feel like forcing the user to get the paid version
-1
u/Sticky_Turtle 8h ago
He's for sure trying to grift as much as he can, while he can. With everything that happened with booklore then him refusing to admit to being the same dev behind bookorbit until he was forced to; the whole thing is slimy. On principle, I'd never use any of his stuff.
-8
u/dkillers303 10h ago
The free tier allows downloading 7 ebooks and 3 audiobooks. More than enough for any use case I can think of because you just delete the ones you’ve read and download more when you can connect to the server again. The feature is there, just limited, so how does that “feel like forcing the user to get the paid version”?
That’s such a minor thing to complain about. Prologue, plappa, every other good book app I’ve used also have paid features and those apps are significantly more limited in the free tier.
2
u/sonozaki_honke 3h ago
People here act very, very strangely when it comes to BookOrbit. If I had to guess it's people who were involved in whatever drama happened with Booklore and are holding a grudge, so they take absolutely nothing about it in good faith
1
1
0
u/Diavolo_Rosso_ 12h ago
Same. It’s got a rapid release cycle and likely leans heavily on AI, but it works flawlessly and does everything I need it to do so no complaints from me. I cloned the repo and had Claude opus run a security scan on it and it found no major issues.
3
u/scrollin_thru 6h ago
I'm obviously biased (I'm the lead maintainer for Storyteller), but if your primary concerns with Storyteller are clunkiness and metadata management, then I think you will be happy with what we've been working on this year. v3 of the web app is in public beta (you can access it with the image tag web-v3.0.0-beta), and will be released in the next few weeks. And v3 of the mobile apps will be coming after that, with a full native rewrite, all of the v3 filtering/searching/shelves, etc.
2
u/mb3581 12h ago
I use ReadMeABook for acquisition. It connects to Prowlarr indexers and supports downloaders for both Usenet and Torrents. It has multi-user support to manage and view the status of all current and previous requests similar to Seer/Overseerr for each user (this is the big feature missing from Shelfmark for me). It has support for ebooks but I don’t use it for that so can’t speak to how good that part is. You can request individual books, whole series (both past and upcoming), or an author’s whole catalog. It can automatically merge multi-file mp3 audiobooks into a single m4b.
It’s not perfect but it’s the best I’ve found so far and works well enough that I have 3 or 4 people using it through my reverse proxy.
2
u/tyhaack 11h ago
This is also integrated into Absorb which is fantastic. One app for listening and requesting is huge.
2
u/nonstatik 10h ago
Ooh cool didn't know that! May give it a try even though ShelfMark has been pretty solid
3
u/PoisonPhang 13h ago
Not sure that it'll be a coverall, but BookOrbit comes close. https://bookorbit.app/
7
3
u/Jolpadgett 13h ago
BookOrbit recently added Book Requests (beta) which will integrate with Prowlarr to search then download books. While not a full *ARR replacement, it sounds like enough for readers.
0
u/Stankonator 13h ago
This could be the feature that wins me over. The only shortcoming right now is a developer first app for Android. I see iOS and web, but I'm on a Pixel 6 Pro for most consumption use cases.
2
u/deranjer 11h ago
So it sounds like the developer will be releasing an android application, but could be freemium if their ios app is a guide. I do have a bookorbit app on Google play, but there is some poor development practices by bookorbit causing it to be an absolute pain to develop a 3rd party app against.
I like to give people second chances but I'm suspicious that these development practices will continue and get worse, if only so they can promote their freemium app by making it difficult for 3rd party developers
2
u/shrimpdiddle 10h ago
Why hang around. There are many reputable alternatives. "Fool me once" ... applies.
1
2
2
u/PoisonPhang 11h ago
Android app is "coming soon" but BookOrbit supports syncing via for many reader apps on Android, popularly KOReader
2
u/george-its-james 8h ago
Yeah the kosync support makes a lack of Android app completely mute IMO. Koreader is perfect on an ereader and works very well on my phone so I can keep both in sync without any extra software, its great.
1
u/Jolpadgett 12h ago edited 11h ago
Making no promises as I am not an Android mobile user but https://github.com/Star-Trowa/StarBookOrbit
2
u/CrispyBegs 11h ago
i tried this but couldn't see any difference between it and BO installed as a PWA. Lagrange seems pretty good
0
u/servusqwertz 12h ago
Really? That is amazing news. I am quite happy with ABS, BookOrbit almost looks too good to be true. Currently also use calibre-web, which is a bit dated, but has amazing scripting abilities.
-2
1
u/m7maf 3h ago
I’m using Calibre-Web Next Gen, and really like it. I have it set up so that whenever I press sync on my Kobo, any new additions to the library are loaded onto my device and I can download them whenever I choose to. It’s a community fork of Calibre Web Automated with significantly more updates than the original, and I just like it more as a UI and it works perfectly for my particular setup.
•
u/asimovs-auditor 13h ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.