I’ve been investing a lot of time into learning python and trying to contribute to the calibre-web project. The calibre-web project is another web solution for the ever popular Calibre e-book management software. It has a very clean, Bootstrap-based interface and comes a ton of features that you can’t find, or isn’t as mature in other offerings.
Here’s a screenshot that is used on the readme.md of the repo:
Go to the repo to get a list of all of the features. I’ve been using the repo for well over a year as my website for my books. I can’t recommend it enough!
Upcoming feature (hopefully): Audiobooks!
A contributor to the repo, Aaron Labiosa (aka modembug), had added a feature that allows for the hosting of audiobooks. Modembug’s feature is scheduled to be in the v1.1 release. I help clean up some of the code, so I got to know the code a bit.
Audiobooks has become a one of my latest rabbit holes to run into. I’ve started listening to audiobooks a little earlier this year again after being away from them for some time. Due to a recent job change, I may have a long commute again and so I figure, why not look into some audiobooks to kill the time?
The issue I encountered was that it’s really hard to download an audiobook for the average user if they are not using iTunes or Amazon’s Audible. If you have a collection of audiobooks disk from ripping them from cd or whatever, you have to figure out how to get the file(s) from your computer to whatever audio device you’re using. This can be incredibly painful process which may require physical access to your home machine.
Moembug’s feature allows you to store an audiobook that has been converted into a single file on the calibre-web application. In addition to storage and hosting, the website will allow you to either listen to the audiobook via streaming or download the audiobook to your device. This was the answer I was looking for! I don’t have to be physically home to get to one of my audiobooks, nor would I have to preload my audiobooks to a cloud service in anticipation of listening to them. Or at least I thought it was the complete solution.
The Problem
All of my devices are IOS devices. Obviously, I would like the ability to download one of my audiobooks on the fly to my iPhone and listen to it with CarPlay. If I attempt to stream an m4a version of the audiobook – everything will work. However, it’ll eat away at my data plan. However, if I attempt to download it, IOS will error out. I assume it’s because of the sandboxing.
However, I did find a solution. Basically use an IOS app that has a builtin browser to download the file. Hopefully one that can play audiobooks, or at least transfer it to a location where you can use it. Enter Documents by Readdle. This app has it’s own browser and does play audiobooks!
On top of that, I found really great audiobook player called Bound. Although Bound isn’t free ($3.99 USD), it’s worth every penny as it allows you to download your audiobook from a number of cloud sources and it’s a great audiobook player.
Now with the two apps and the new feature that is hopefully coming soon to calibre-web, I’ll be able to download and access my audiobooks while I’m away from the house, with only a minimal amount of jumping through hoops!
Hopefully the above will provide you with some thoughts on how to get audiobooks to your device without having to rely on iTunes or Amazon’s Audible.
-JT