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.
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If the experience that a paying customer gets is worse than the experience they get from pirating, then that’s the fault of the company selling that enshitified experience.
It’s wild how modern businesses are trying to kill themselves with every terrible idea they have to make more money.
As shitty as Amazon is, I will say that the books I’ve gotten through Audible are all still there and I can listen to them whenever I want even though I don’t have a subscription or anything anymore.
Wait for a while and Amazon will go down the same route.
Audible replaced a version of a book my boyfriend bought with a completely different version of the same book. I mean a different narrator and everything. He had purchased the book a few years earlier but he didn’t manage to get a refund from them.
The Martian by Andy weir was my first experience of this. They re-recorded it with will wheaton and I “lost” my original with RC Bray. Though I will admit my version was part of the plus catalog, I still didn’t get a choice.
Why would they think this is okay?
I’ve been enjoying LibroFM instead of Audible. Same subscription/credits per month model, but a portion goes to support a local bookstore of your choice. Feels way better to do that than give any extra money to Amazon.
OP hasn’t purchased any book. They’re on a plan that lets them listen to any book for free, except it’s time-limited.
I purchased 3/5 books of the series. The 2 free books add up to 13 hours.
I bought a few books off audible, and while I can still access them even without a subscription, I still have them converted to mp3 on my NAS, in case I ever lose access to audible for some reason.
Have you found a way to split those mp3s into several files by chapter etc.? All converters that I have tried so far just yield a single, several hours long mp3…
https://github.com/audiamus/AaxAudioConverter
This should be able to split them by chapter.
Thanks, I’ll try it
Full Explanation:
Spotify introduced Audiobooks to their platform in November 2023:
- Unlimited listening to public domain classics.
- 15 free hours per month of premium audiobooks.
- 10 hour top ups available.
- Can purchase premium audiobooks for unlimited listening.
OP purchased book 1 and can listen to it all they want. They did not purchase book 2 or 3, and also listened to other audiobooks, putting them over the 15 hour limit.
Key Facts:
- Spotify Audiobooks are a new feature with no additional subscription cost.
- OP used all of their free credits for the month.
- OP was never prevented from listening to a book they purchased.
That said, stop paying for audiobooks like a chump and get a library card.
All the free audiobooks you want from your library using hoopla and Libby.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fick libby, the company thatade it doesn’t care about its employees
That’s most companies buddy.
That’s an awful lot of words for “Spotify is bullshit.”
I mean, seems like this is way better for listening to audiobooks than when they had no audiobooks whatsoever
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Important info here. Definitely not the impression I got from the OP.
So OP is complaining about being limited by the amount of free books OP can listen to? Sounds fair to me, these things cost money to make, and websites cost money to run.
How is an audiobook different from any other piece of audio?
Licensing costs
Just look how much this little machine is costing the music industry! https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/this-season-a-notorious-pirate-gives-the-music-industry-an-expensive-gift/
Lol, but seriously… licensing costs the license holders nothing… but it does costs spotify something.
Yeah, Spotify can’t just go around pirating audiobooks.
Dang youre right there’s probably a huge difference when you calculate it by the second (certainly cheaper).
Sure whatever you say step corp-bro
Ok, thats funny. But for real, what I’m lightly annoyed by is the way they seem to be using the 15 hours of audiobooks as a sort of free-trial to get you to buy more credits, and also how much podcasts and audiobooks are pushed even for those of us who exclusively use spotify for music. On the other hand, if you use the feature, it cost you nothing additional to use up to that 15 hours, or those free books, its strictly a value add.
Weird way to say “just torrent the audio book”
Oh man, I did the hard work (it was easy) of reading some rules and answering some questions via irc to get an invite to MAM and wow is that a treasure-trove of ebooks and audiobooks.
dude yes it’s great but remove the name please
Why, are even names flagged in some way? MAM is amazing, but if I have to never talk about it to protect it more, I will.
Puts pitchfork away
Thank you for the context.
Reading is hard when doing several hour long commutes… Audiobooks also can enhance the book as some are edited to cut out parts which really don’t contribute. A good editor can make or break a book. I do like reading, but there are times where audiobooks not only provide better experience, they are also the most time efficient as can be enjoyed during other tasks.
My library’s website lets you check out audiobooks. Is that not common?
That’s cool. Ours doesn’t, but it is a rather tiny place and not those fancy libraries with 3D printers and stuff…
See my other comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/7069535
You’re making disingenuous assumptions when you say I listened to other audiobooks. I have only listened to this series. purchased 3, and listened to 2 of the free (premium) books. I did not listen to any other books. There were a couple times it skipped a chapter with an accidental scroll, and I had to scroll back, but I didn’t actually listen so it shouldn’t count.
I wasn’t aware of the 15 hour limit but of course I am now as it’s been pointed out many times in this thread. I didn’t even know they had audiobooks until they started showing up on the opening screen of Spotify. I got hooked listening to the Steven Fry narrated OG book and then went to buy the next 3 and the last book in the series was also included in premium so I listened without buying. Still, 13 hours (which makes up for any skipping) is not 15 hours, so there’s either a bug or they intentionally count unlistened to skipped chapters as being listened to.
I’m getting Libby setup today with my library card.
You do realise this is a pirate community? The way yor comment reads, it seems like you dislike OP wanting free stuff.
I am aware of people doing some mental gymnastics to justify piracy. But IMHO that is about the same difference as a pirate to a privateer. Just acknowledge that you want stuff without paying and hoist that black flag.
https://archive.org/details/hhgttg-ab/
Read by Stephen Fry, no less.
The OG HHGTTG is, the prequel and subsequent books in the series are not unfortunately. But I got used to the other guys voice quickly.
Good to know. Someone posted that in a Books community a few months back and I had it bookmarked. So far, I’ve only listened to the first one that Fry narrated.
The Steven Fry narration really drew me in. He’s fantastic. I was bummed when I started listening to the others but quickly got used to it. Martin Freeman is a good narrator, if not as animated and loud as Fry.
You should give the Douglas Adams narrated ones a try.
He narrated his own?? Hell yeah, I’m going to download them today and give them a re-listen on the suggested apps to see which I like most.
Tbh as a quick fix your local library almost certainly has this audio book. Finish your book then you can look into piracy.
Sadly, that’s the case less and less these days. Distributors are forcing libraries to use digital resources and gouging them on prices.
That would probably explain why mine has 2 digital copies of a book to loan out, and there’s usually a line of 50 people waiting for them.
100%
The loaning models are designed to punish libraries.
You reminded me I do have major regional library card access, if they don’t expire after a couple years.
Pretty sure they don’t. If they do though it’s just a simple matter of showing them your ID.
Yo always check out your library first before piracy, if you can get it free and traffic your library you ought to
(Just cuz libraries are dope)
Do you mean the book is accessible through the Libby app or do you mean to physically go to the library and get a DVD or something? Because my library for example has a very limited number of books in Libby and the last time my PC had DVD-ROM was in 2008
More often Hoopla than Libby for me in the SF Bay Area!
Don’t look for/notice the physical CDs, even filter them out.
Don’t panic. You’ve come to the right place. Spread out your towel and lay on it for a nice nap while you wait for lemmings to reply.
Go to your local library and ask if they have audiobook borrowing through Libby or a similar platform! Not only are you NOT limited on listening hours, but it’s free! You just might have to wait if all the “copies” are borrowed at the moment.
Also, if you have a cool library like I do, you might be able to borrow from multiple libraries. For example, my library card is for the St. Louis County Library, but it can also be used at the St. Charles County Library. So if I am looking for an audiobook on Libby, and SLCL has 3 virtual copies and they are all borrowed, I can search SCCL to see if they have any. I’ve had many situations where I’ll find one library or the other will have a copy available for borrowing with no wait.
Just to piggyback on this comment… If you have a dope library like mine, you don’t even have to go in person to get your library card and do all of the above. I signed up for a card online, downloaded Libby, got everything set up and had an ebook checked out that same day.
Does anyone know cities in the US where you can get a library card and not be from that city, or even state? I know there are a few
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You bought the audiobooks on Spotify, and then they limited your listening time? What the fuck? Do you have a subscription? DIdn’t even know they sold audiobooks; just thought they had some free ones.
Exactly. I pay for Spotify premium, I purchased 3/5 books in this series, and maybe it’s because 2 of the books were free with premium (incl this last book) that it’s time limiting me. But if that’s the case it’s also counting time listened during my paid-for eBooks. Absolutely crazy to me.
That doesn’t sound right, I’m betting it’s a bug due to some in the series being bought and some on the time limit deal. Reach out to support.
If this isn’t an unintended glitch that’s horse shit. I would cancel my account and tell them why.
2 ebooks could easily be >15hours. OP sounds like a bullshitter to me. I don’t see how they could come to the conclusion that “its also counting time listened during my paid-for ebooks”. They could provide more info, but they arent. I think they just got mad that they couldnt finish the last 20 minutes of the book (understandably) and decided to flame spotify
So it’s supposed to be 15 hours/month included with your premium subscription? Since I’m not familiar with how Spotify audio books work, I thought you meant that you had a free account and was allowed to listen 15 hours to books that would be included/unlimited with a premium subscription. Contact support if it ate through your monthly credits faster that it should. If you’re a paying customer supports are usually quite helpful.
Yeah, it’s weird, I thought they were just included with premium, no idea there was a listening limit.
Audiobookbay, My Anonamouse, Audiobookshelf
I have even found some while using soulseek
This is the way…
Audiobookshelf is the tits
Edit: It’s so straightforward my hygienist wife can use it.
Are… hygienists famously known for not being smart? I don’t think that’s a thing lmao
High gymnast? It’s ok my ex-wife is a tard and she’s a pilot now.
Ow My Balls! plays in background
If you wanna selfhost your own solution, I can recommend Audiobookshelf. It scraps metadata from Apple, Amazon, Google etc, tracks on a per-user basis at what point in the book you are, can be used in a browser and has an android app. It’s easy to set up with Docker too. You can even add PDFs and epubs to the books.
Been using it for a few months and it has been great.
As for sourcing of audiobooks, aside from torrents there are also audiobb.com & audiobooksbee.com . They use RapidGator as host for a ddl.
Mobilism.org has also served me very well for over a decade
average mobilism enjoyer
Theres an iOS app too… only available via testflight, and I don’t recall where the link is… but its out there.
Hey, thanks for the Audiobookshelf recommendation!
Recently I was looking for a audiobook player and Smart Audiobook Player was the best I found, but Audiobookshelf have almost all of the functions I liked like simultaneous dual timeline bar (one for the whole book and another for the current chapter), auto sleep, shake to reset sleep and so on. Just missed the small beep alert before the audio fade out on sleep.
Anyway, and all of this with the advantage of using my already selfhosted data, so no need to keep transferring files manually to the device. And all the progress are synced back to my homeserver, so I can use multiple devices without any problems.
Fuck Spotify I would demand a refund then do a chargeback if they refuse. This is fucked.
You can only do so many chargebacks before you’re banned from using that payment network, which considering it’s Spotify they likely use one of the largest payment networks. I save chargebacks for when I got royally fscked, not just irritated inconvenience.
It’s been a while since I had the opportunity for audiobooks, so those specifically I’m a little out of the loop. Audiobookbay was a thing at some point.
For e books… Z-library and/ or Anna’s archive. The reader I use is ReadEra premium, it can handle pretty much any format although default to pick is epub. I don’t think you really need to buy premium, I just did because I wanted to support them. I’ve been using it for forever with almost no problems. You can adjust the things you want (font, spacing, light/dark, etc), but the basic format when reading is very simple once you have it set up
+1 from me for ReadEra as well, great app.
I already use ReadEra for all my documents needs. Does it save progress well with audiobooks?
I believe he’s using it for ebooks, not audiobooks. I don’t think it’s playing audio.
Ok, audiobook isn’t the same as an ebook.
Spotify is absolute ass for audiobooks and podcasts. I wish there was something better for streaming, although one of these days I’ll get around to self hosting. Maybe after retirement…
Anyway, for audiobooks I used “Voice Audiobook Player”, it’s free and open source, minimal permissions required.
For anyone wondering about podcasts, “Podcast Addict”. It has too many menus and options, can be confusing, but still a million times better than Spotify. Once you have it set up the way you want those options are very nice. Still confusing at times though :D
That’s my fault, I messed up and said ebook a few times while meaning audiobooks.
This isn’t exactly what you asked for and might not even work, but look up xManager. It lets you install a modded version of Shittify with premium features on free accounts – maybe this limitation is something they also modded away?
The moment they tried to make me pay just to skip songs was the moment I downloaded xmanager. Haven’t gone back since. Absolutely ridiculous what Spotify thinks I will pay for.
The enshitification is real!
Library Card
Depends on your local library but I have for example unlimited E Books included.
Libby app.
I’m embarrassed that I never thought of this. Sure enough, my library lends both e-books and audiobooks. It’s limited to 2-3 per month, but that’s more than I need anyway
I saw a librarian say on a post that people should borrow from the library anyways, even if they don’t think that they’ll get to it before it’s due, because it means that they can use the higher rates of usage to argue for more funding. Getting something for free and helping the local libraries at the same time? Sounds like a win-win to me.
you get 15 hours of listening to any audiobook on spotify included with premium and it refreshes every month. Two of the books did not come free they are part of the 15 hours that you can use on any book “included with premium”
That doesn’t really sound like a premium.
Sounds more like a “bait and switch”, or your friendly neighborhood dealer saying “first hit is free”
First week of hits are free, and I’ll give you another week of free hits every month. So as long as you don’t need more than 1 week per month of hits, then you’re golden.
Honestly though, if OP really got 27 days into the cycle before using up his free hits, its almost a perfect solution for them.
Let’s be gracious and round up. That’s 13 hours. Not 15.
“Let me explain the bullshit rules for you, then you will see how you were in the wrong and our underhanded corporate tactics are helping society”
I’m not arguing for the service I’m just trying to make sure everyone has a full understanding of the situation. You are just looking for things to be outraged about.
I suppose.
