Edit: A couple times I’ve said eBook while I actually meant Audiobook. I’ve learned that Spotify has a 15 hour limit per month for their free ‘included in premium’ audiobooks. However these are the two books I listened to for free, and even rounding up to 13 hours it doesn’t make sense, unless they count accidental chapter skips which weren’t actually listened to. But it’s clear now that I know about the 15 hour limit, that they are not counting the time listening to paid audiobooks.
First book I listened to for free:
Second book I listened to for free:
OG post:
I purchased 3 eBooks in the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy series (2 came free) and I’m on the final book. 20 minutes left in the last book and this is what Spotify tells me.
I’m over the edge now. I’ve been putting it off too long. I have a nice NUC I purchased about a year ago.
I’m tech inclined, 20 years of hobbyism, know the linux command line well. Work in IT consulting. But I’m busy. Very busy, and unmotivated to do things like hours of research and toying with settings getting things to work, if I ever have the time.
But this is the start of my new personal revolution.
I’ll read the wiki and have read about Sonarr, etc, and I also want movies and shows, but is there anything specifically for eBooks? Looks like Readarr is my best bet? Stripping the DRM of already purchased (and free with Spotify ‘Premium’) books to share on a seedbox is also something I’m willing to take requests on. Is there a way to rip from Spotify if you have a premium account? And what’s the best Android eBook reader (the last 3-4 I tried sucked with pirated eBooks)?
I know I’m sounding like a noob asking everything to be handed to me right now, but I am willing to put in the research and welcome and highly appreciate anyone with tips to point me in the right directions.
I tried this and the waiting list for anything remotely worth a damn was months long. I just went and pirated the thing instead.
Has your experience been different?
I experience that, but you should get more library cards.
Hoopla has better availability but a worse app. Libby can have long wait lists but I just keep a queue going. There’s always a good list of available now audiobooks to keep me going until my holds are available.
The more you use the library the better it is. My partner reads almost a hundred books a year. She’s voracious. She reads them almost exclusively through the library. With Libby you’re able to juggle holds easily so that new books are always coming up when you finish the last one. If it comes back too early you just tell it to wait.
I particularly seem to be into stuff that my community isn’t feverishly trying to rent. That helps haha. Traditional paper books too, I could keep renewing them for a stupid amount of time because they didn’t end up on hold. Found out the limit was 255 renewals until they suddenly dropped it to like 10 max. :(
But sadly all the good nerd stuff like R.A. Salvatore books or Discworld always has queues, yeah.
I can get almost anything from my library as long as it’s not the brand new hotness. Occasionally there’ll be a book here or a book there that’s got one person waiting in line, but our maximum checkout time is a week. I pull the book down rip the audio from it and free up my hold the same day.
What tools do you use to rip the audio? I’m just wondering so I don’t accidentally do it.
You could go as far as virtual audio cables and audacity. No matter what changes they can’t stop that.
But if your library supports OD, go dig up the old PC app for OD. When you download the book to start listening to it it decrypts it as it throws it onto the drive.
Some books seem to have some weird duplicated audio here and there is a coffee protection method. Like there’s some secret M3U somewhere that skips around when it plays it, but most stuff comes out clean.
If you can’t get it to come out with the app use one of the virtual audio cable style applications wire the output into a line-in for audacity and just rerecord the whole thing compress it down. You lose individual chapters as files I don’t really pay attention to the chapters I’m on I care about the total distance to the book and being able to pick up where I left off. I suppose if you were trying to do some kind of hybrid read and listen back and forth it would be more useful to have the chapter numbers.