1y ago

Wot The Fsck You Say, Spotify?

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.

208 comments

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.
  
  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 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...

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?
  
  Fick libby, the company thatade it doesn't care about its employees
- 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
- 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?
  
  Sure whatever you say step corp-bro
- 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?
- 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.

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.
- 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

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.
  
  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

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.

libraries let you check out audiobooks for free
- They even often have them streaming for free. All of my wife's audiobooks are free streamed via the library and she listens to them every day.
- My library closed recently because of structural issues with the building. I finally made up my mind and drove over to get a card. What a bummer.

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.

What the fuck lmao
Why does anyone use shitify
- Why does anyone use shitify
  Virtually every single song in the world in your pocket for a little over 10 euros a month doesn't seem like a bad deal to me. Then again why does anyone use spotify for anything other than listening to music, there your guess is as good as mine.
  
  Some currently trending pop music, you say?
- Convenient, easy to use, available everywhere.
  
  YouTube music clients?
- How is it shitty in this case? That's literally what OP bought, the right to listen to any book in Spotify's catalog for free, for a certain number of hours. If they wanted to listen to a specific book unlimited they should have purchased that book directly.
  
  Because thats what "buying" means, right.
- I've got a cracked version of some dodgy russian app store

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.

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?
  
  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
  
  I believe he's using it for ebooks, not audiobooks. I don't think it's playing audio.

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.

Love your local library. The Lemmy app is a good way to access content.
Also pirating... I live in the southern US, where they keep underfunding my library.
- You almost certainly meant to say Libby.
  
  Hahaha yes, thanks!

for ripping music from Spotify, best solution I know is spotdl which just downloads an album or playlist link given to it, and fetches the equivalent from YouTube.
- You my friend, are a fucking rockstar
- You could also go the route of directly downloading from spotify with Zotify. If you got premium it downloads in full 320kps. (Make sure to use the --download-real-time=True toggle to raise no suspicion for spotify servers. This way you download as fast as if you were listening to the songs/audiobooks yourself. Its a command line tool. Though if it can remove possible DRM Watermarks from the audiostream - no clue. But i wouldnt think they actually do that.
  
  This is exactly what I was looking for!

I use soggfy to rip from Spotify and can recommend that. Other than that myanonamouse is the place to be for audiobooka imo

Enshitification!

I stopped paying when they started serving adverts in 2020. Why am I paying a subscription fee to be served adverts? Especially during a period where I was only listening to a few hours per week. Fck dat greedy piggies.

Haven't looked at the audiobook player scene on Android since stumbling over Smart Audiobook Player some years ago. I bought the full edition after enjoying it. It has a scraper for images and works well with titles downloaded from audiobookbay.
- It's a great app. Works really well with android auto, which is how I consume most of my audiobooks.
- I tested a few last year, this one is still the best
- Does it let you have a folder of books and keep your place when you pause the book or exit the app? Many don't seem to keep the progress very well.
  
  Yes

I'm all about piracy, but as another alternative, consider seeing if you can get a digital library card somewhere local or multiple and connect them to Libby to borrow books and audio books for 2 weeks at a time

And what’s the best Android eBook reader
https://f-droid.org/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/

For now there's an app called xmanager that will patch your Spotify install to give you full access to a paid account
- Thank you for pointing out this app 🙏👍
- Is this iOS or Android or both?
  
  idk for sure but I think just android. it requires sideloading, on my android phone what it does is download an official version of spotify then patch it locally and install it. evidently it's illegal to distribute the patched apk but not the original apk and the instructions for patching it, so this is how they get around that.

I just love this machine built by Peter Sunde (Pirate Bay. It copies a file to /dev/null and tracks how much it costs the music industry 😂https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/12/this-season-a-notorious-pirate-gives-the-music-industry-an-expensive-gift/

xManager

I didn't really like readarr, it had a weird workflow and I find books to be different than series (they have longer release frequency, for example) so I'm getting them manually and importing into calibre for metadata. This way I can also check the quality of each epub because I hate finding that the book I'm going to read is badly formatted or has a weird encoding.

Try Libby. It's an audiobook streaming platform that goes through the library system.

I have the whole series as DRM-free MP3. Let me know if you want it.
- DM sent
  
  Better late than never and I responded! Check your DM. :)

It's no too hard. You could do it over a weekend if you're technically inclined like you say.
My tip: set it up on a clean pc (or nas or pi or whatever you're gonna use), don't use your old pc that still has all your files and stuff. I just booted up my old pc, that I hadn't cleaned and got the whole arr suite and plex set up for my local network. It all works, but now that I want to open it up to the outside, I realize that have to first clean my pc. That pretty much means starting over.
- Can you recommend a distro for being a media server? I too have been complacent about my media habits, and the time has come to sort it out.
  
  I'm very comfortable on debian but do make sure you disable automatic suspension if you install gnome because that shit is not in any settings you can edit in the control panel.
  
  Depends on your use case I guess. I personally use unraid for my server which works fine but if you don't want to pay anything and have a good experience choose Ubuntu server or Debian (since they are the most supported and stable) but I have no clue about that either, theoretically you can do it on every distro

I can only help with the last part as I use audible. Have you tried Voice? https://droidify.eu.org/app/?id=de.ph1b.audiobook&repo_address=https://f-droid.org/repo
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.ph1b.audiobook

Soulseek/Nicotine+

For ebooks z-library is king. They even have an android app.
For music I use deezload2bot on telegram and save it on my sd card. Works great for me.

An audiobook, of an ebook, of a book, adaped from a radio play... ok then?
- You should try the video game!!
  
  EXAMINE POCKET
  
  I keep seeing that around, but was never able to find it back in the day. Guess I should dig my tricorn out of storage.
- They're all a bit different though

Besides piracy, you can also find modded versions of apps, they basically unlock all pro features and often add more. I know I have a Spotify app, but it's really old. Still works though.

fsck.ext4
If you want to listen music more conveniently - qbittorrent, the pirate bay, vlc, enjoy

I use the readera app on my android tablet. Haven't had any problems with it yet.

Get on a plexshare/emby share /appbox with a good ebook selection. Save your time.
- This is the piracy community. A comment like this isn't very useful without at least a point in the right direction of how to get started doing this. How do you find one?
  
  There used to be a plex share subreddit that would turn up if you just googled "plex share". I thought just knowing the services existed would be enough for the guy to search it and turns those up.
  But now that I check it seems that reddit shut those subs down about 5 months ago, so I have no idea where people get access to those services now outside direct referrals.
  
  Vpn set to northern Europe, audiobookbay

Lidarr can pull Spotify playlists or followed artists. Also have a look at the trash guides for setting up sonarr and radar, now there's even a docker that auto co figures your sonarr and radar based off the latest trash guide settings
- Whaaaaaat? It can? How does it work? Used to use the aur package spotify-ripper which was awesome, it used my creds and all that and pulled all the metadata from Spotify and it was awesome. I'd just cron it to run weekly against my likes playlist.
  Others I've seen use Spotify but just pull the song file and nothing else. Does lidarr do a good job? I hate a messy metadata library.
  
  Yeah it can import information from spotify then search for everything with your Downloader depending on if you torrent or usenet and you can set the quality that you want so it can keep upgrading your library over time as it finds better quality up to the max that you set
  
  settings > lists
  easiest is to use the lidarr script with deemix, it automatically downloads everything.

If I read correctly it says "don't use spotify for listening to ebooks".

Readarr (works for audiobooks and ebooks, just run two instances) and MyAnonaMouse or ABTorrents, plus your favorite front end (mine is Plex + Prologue).

Relevant Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU

And so find yourself a plexshare. Or, I guess, nowdays a jellyfin share or whatever.
I pay 10$/months and I have all the movies and tv shows and audiobooks in the world. In one app. Awefuly convenient.
Why would I ever bother setting this up myself if I can just pay someone 10$ to do that. I'm busy and all. Oh, yes, I can maintain a Linux server, no problem. I just value my time.

Keep embracing digital only, assholes... This is what you're signing up for.
- I don't have time to sit down and read books. I have the disease of modernity. Will you read to me when I call?

208 comments