books

i-threw-away-audible’s-app,-and-now-i-self-host-my-audiobooks

I threw away Audible’s app, and now I self-host my audiobooks


Stream your DRM-free audiobooks to devices yourselves, without the cloud’s chains.

We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We’ve collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon’s Audible) and from older physical “books on tape” (most of which are actually on CDs). I don’t mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible’s app to play things directly—it’s (sometimes) quick, it’s (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app’s “Library” button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the “right” way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

Screenshot of Lee's library

Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks.

Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Audiobookshelf! Behold, the unholy melding together of my wife’s and my audiobooks. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Audiobookshelf

Audiobookshelf is a self-hosted audiobook and podcast server, and after two weeks of use, so far it works vastly better than trying to stream within Audible’s app. My wife can now actually listen to audiobooks instead of staring at a spinning loading icon forever.

To get Audiobookshelf running, you need something to run it on—a spare desktop or other computer you’re not using should fit the bill, as Audiobookshelf’s requirements are relatively meager. You can either install it via a Docker image, or on bare metal on Windows or several different Linux distros. (The Linux distro installations include a repository for handling updates via your system’s update method, so you won’t have to be manually installing releases willy-nilly.)

Since I already have a Proxmox instance up and running on my LAN, I chose to install Audiobookshelf inside an Ubuntu 24.04 LXC container using the “bare metal” method. It’s not particularly resource-intensive, using about 150MB of RAM at idle; as noted above, if you don’t have a server handy, running Audiobookshelf via Docker on your desktop or laptop shouldn’t be much of a burden on your memory or CPU. (It does suck up a fair amount of processing power when it’s bulk-importing or matching books in your library, but these aren’t things you’ll be doing terribly often.)

Screenshot of htop

Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop.

Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Audiobookshelf process resource utilization in htop. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Getting it going

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf installed via your preferred method, your next stop is creating and then populating your library. You can do this directly in the application’s web interface, if desired:

Screenshot of Audiobookshelf upload page

You can populate your library via Audiobookshelf’s upload page, if desired. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

I chose to do it the old-fashioned way and copy files into the library location myself, which also works.

There are a number of ways to make sure Audiobookshelf properly ingests and categorizes your books; first, it is aware of and respects metadata tags if your books have them. If your files lack tags, the Audiobookshelf docs provide several other methods of organization using file and directory structure. Between tags and being able to just name things per the guide, I had no problem uploading all 300-ish of my books into Audiobookshelf, with no misses or mismatches.

Of course, this all presupposes that you’ve got some DRM-free audiobooks. There are plenty of sources where you can get books free of charge—like Librivox, for example. If you’re using pay sites like Audible, you’ll want to actually log in to your library via a web browser and download each audiobook locally; this will give you a pile of files in .AAX format or something similar—which leads to a significant caveat.

The DRM elephant in the room

While books that come on audio CDs don’t have DRM embedded in them, files downloaded from Audible or other for-pay sources often do. Audiobookshelf won’t play books with DRM, which means you need a method of stripping that DRM out.

Unfortunately, here’s where we run into a problem: removing DRM from your audiobooks is not universally legal. “In the US, the law against ‘circumventing’ effective DRM has no personal-use exemption. In Europe, it varies by country,” explained the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Competition and IP Litigation Director Mitch Stoltz when Ars reached out for advice. “That’s as silly as it sounds—stripping DRM from one’s own copy of an audiobook in order to listen to it privately through different software doesn’t threaten the author or publisher, except that it makes it harder for them to charge you twice for the same audiobook. It’s another example of how anti-circumvention laws interfere with consumers’ rights of ownership over the things they buy.”

And that means you’re kind of on your own for this step. Should you live in a jurisdiction where DRM removal from audiobooks for personal use is legal—which includes some but not all European countries—then sites like this one can assist in the process; for the rest of us, the only advice I can give is to simply proceed in a legal manner and use DRM-free audiobooks to start with.

Playing things

Once you’ve got Audiobookshelf set up and your DRM-free books stuffed into it, the last piece of the puzzle is an app to actually listen to books with. There is an official Audiobookshelf app, and if you’re an Android user you can grab it right here. The iOS app is perpetually stuck in beta and requires Test Flight, but there are third-party alternatives.

Personally, I’ve been using Plappa, and I’ve found it to be not just perfectly acceptable, but also more responsive and less prone to crashing than Apple’s own Books app (not to mention there’s no annoying in-app audiobook store page always trying to get in my face!).

Administrating things

Audiobookshelf itself has plenty of tunable options for the home system administrator who just can’t leave well enough alone; I’ve found most of the defaults are exactly what I want, but there’s tons of stuff to tweak if you want to do the tweaking.

Notably, Audiobookshelf supports multiple libraries if you want more organizational options. It has accounts you can set up for different listeners, logging options, notification options, RSS support, and a whole mess of other things I honestly haven’t even looked at yet. The good news for me is that you don’t have to look at any of that stuff if you don’t want to—Audiobookshelf is set up to be workable right out of the box.

But what if I’m not home?

Sharper readers might already have spotted a major problem with self-hosting audiobooks on one’s LAN: How do you listen when you’re not on the LAN?

This is probably worth another article, but the way I’m tackling this particular problem is with a local instance of Wireguard and a VPN profile on my mobile devices. When I’m out and about or in the car or whatever, I can tap the “VPN” shortcut on my iOS home screen, and boom—Plappa is now able to see Audiobookshelf, and streaming works just as well as it does at home.

One potential concern for doing this is cellular data usage, but this fear seems minor. The biggest audiobook I’ve got is a cool multicast recording of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which weighs in at about 2.4GB—so, the most data I’m going to transfer even for my biggest audiobook is 2.4GB max, and that’d only be if I listened to all hillion-jillion hours of Dune at the same time. And depending on the app you’re using for playback, you’ll likely also have the option to download the books to your device and listen to them locally, without streaming. (This is true for Plappa, at least.)

Self-hosting happiness achieved

I glossed over a lot of the setup steps to keep this a relatively short piece, but even so, getting Audiobookshelf going is a relatively simple self-hosting task, as self-hosting tasks go.

We also haven’t talked about Audiobookshelf’s other major feature: podcast hosting. I’m not a big podcast kind of guy (I tend to prefer audiobooks if I have time to listen to something), but Audiobookshelf is also (purportedly) great for hosting a giant pile of podcasts. If those are your jam, then that’s another point for Audiobookshelf.

I can’t vouch for the podcasting bits, but I can say that it’s gratifying to have solved a problem—especially one that was driving my wife crazy, and any day I can solve a problem for her via nerdery and server-wrangling is a good day. At least as of right now, the Audible app on her phone remains nonfunctional for reasons that are beyond me, but with luck—and a bit of ongoing care and maintenance for the server in the closet where this stuff all lives now—neither of us will ever have to deal with that app again.

Photo of Lee Hutchinson

Lee is the Senior Technology Editor, and oversees story development for the gadget, culture, IT, and video sections of Ars Technica. A long-time member of the Ars OpenForum with an extensive background in enterprise storage and security, he lives in Houston.

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how-to-avoid-the-cognitive-hooks-and-habits-that-make-us-vulnerable-to-cons

How to avoid the cognitive hooks and habits that make us vulnerable to cons

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of <em> Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.</em>” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/fool1-800×531.jpg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris are the authors of Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.

Basic Books

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: A conversation with psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris on the key habits of thinking and reasoning that may serve us well most of the time, but can make us vulnerable to being fooled.

It’s one of the most famous experiments in psychology. Back in 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris conducted an experiment on inattentional blindness. They asked test subjects to watch a short video in which six people—half in white T-shirts, half in black ones—passed basketballs around. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. Halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the midst of the players and thumped their chest at the camera before strolling off-screen. What surprised the researchers was that fully half the test subjects were so busy counting the number of basketball passes that they never saw the gorilla.

The experiment became a viral sensation—helped by the amusing paper title, “Gorillas in Our Midst“—and snagged Simons and Chabris the 2004 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize. It also became the basis of their bestselling 2010 book, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Thirteen years later, the two psychologists are back with their latest book, published last July, called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and What We Can Do About It.  Simons and Chabris have penned an entertaining examination of key habits of thinking that usually serve us well but also make us vulnerable to cons and scams. They also offer some practical tools based on cognitive science to help us spot deceptions before being taken in.

“People love reading about cons, yet they keep happening,” Simons told Ars. “Why do they keep happening? What is it those cons are tapping into? Why do we not learn from reading about Theranos? We realized there was a set of cognitive principles that seemed to apply across all of the domains, from cheating in sports and chess to cheating in finance and biotech. That became our organizing theme.”

Ars spoke with Simons and Chabris to learn more.

Ars Technica: I was surprised to learn that people still fall for basic scams like the Nigerian Prince scam. It reminds me of Fox Mulder’s poster on The X-Files: “I want to believe.

Daniel Simons: The Nigerian Prince scam is an interesting one because it’s been around forever. Its original form was in letters. Most people don’t get fooled by that one. The vast majority of people look at it and say, this thing is written in terrible grammar. It’s a mess. And why would anybody believe that they’re the one to recover this vast fortune? So there are some people who fall for it, but it’s a tiny percentage of people. I think it’s still illustrative because that one is obviously too good to be true for most people, but there’s some small subset of people for whom it’s just good enough. It’s just appealing enough to say, “Oh yeah, maybe I could become rich.”

There was a profile in the New Yorker of a clinical psychologist who fell for it. There are people who, for whatever reason, are either desperate or have the idea that they deserve to inherit a lot of money. But there are a lot of scams that are much less obvious than that one, selecting for the people who are most naive about it. I think the key insight there is that we tend to assume that only gullible people fall for this stuff. That is fundamentally wrong. We all fall for this stuff if it’s framed in the right way.

Christopher Chabris: I don’t think they’re necessarily people who always want to believe. I think it really depends on the situation. Some people might want to believe that they can strike it rich in crypto, but they would never fall for a Nigerian email or, for that matter, they might not fall for a traditional Ponzi scheme because they don’t believe in fiat money or the stock market. Going back to the Invisible Gorilla, one thing we noticed was a lot of people would ask us, “What’s the difference between the people who noticed the gorilla and the people who didn’t notice the gorilla?” The answer is, well, some of them happened to notice it and some of them didn’t. It’s not an IQ or personality test. So in the case of the Nigerian email, there might’ve been something going on in that guy’s life at that moment when he got that email that maybe led him to initially accept the premise as true, even though he knew it seemed kind of weird. Then, he got committed to the idea once he started interacting with these people.

Christopher Chabris

So one of our principles is commitment: the idea that if you accept something as true and you don’t question it anymore, then all kinds of bad decisions and bad outcomes can flow from that. So, if you somehow actually get convinced that these guys in Nigeria are real, that can explain the bad decisions you make after that. I think there’s a lot of unpredictableness about it. We all need to understand how these things work. We might think it sounds crazy and we would never fall for it, but we might if it was a different scam at a different time.

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“metaversed”:-a-book-review-and-author-interview

“Metaversed”: A Book Review and Author Interview

Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype is the new book by Samantha G. Wolfe and Luis Bravo Martins introducing the metaverse stripped of its over-inflated, pie-in-the-sky expectation cloud built up by marketers. The book presents a practical and balanced approach to using the metaverse as it exists today and preparing for how it might exist tomorrow.

ARPost received a copy of Metaversed and had the opportunity to interview the authors on how it came together and what they hope it will achieve.

Preparing for the Metaverse

Metaversed begins with an important and common question in the industry: how do we prepare for the metaverse when we can’t agree on what it is?

“Taking the internet and bringing another dimension to it and setting it free in the phygital world […] it’s almost impossible to fully understand the extent of this shift.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

Early on, the authors present a working definition of the metaverse. This isn’t for the authors to throw their definition into the war of words already taking place around the metaverse, but rather so that everyone reading Metaversed has a common starting point.

“To the authors, the metaverse is the next stage of the internet and results from the evolution of a wide variety of emerging exponential technologies maturing simultaneously, converging and enabling a new interconnected relationship between physical and digital.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

Metaversed isn’t just about technology, but how technology impacts us as a society and as individuals – and about the societal trends that are helping to usher in the metaverse. These include movements towards remote work and education, decentralization, social media, and the creator economy.

“The challenges we’re about to face will need a multidisciplinary effort. Business professionals from all areas, teachers, lawyers, scientists, historians, and sociologists, everyone can contribute with their experience and knowledge so we can start preparing for this tremendous shift.”

– Chapter One: Predictions

A Book Written for Anybody

Metaversed is written for a reader in any profession to encompass the entire metaverse. Chapter two presents all of the technologies playing into the development of the metaverse. That includes immersive technologies like the spatial web, XR hardware, and digital twins. It also includes Web3 and blockchain, cloud computing, and AI and ML.

“I feel like we went through a hype cycle of ‘the metaverse’ as a term and now we’re kind of past that. People are looking beyond that and asking, ‘What is this, really?’” said Wolfe. “I’m hoping that as people get past all of that hype they can ask ‘What does this mean to me, and what does this mean to my business?’”

Metaversed See Beyond the Hype bookReaders of ARPost might be principally interested in immersive technologies. Understanding the role that these technologies will play in larger shifts in the coming years requires an understanding of other technologies even though they may feel removed.

“The main topic is to bring in people that are not in on all of the metaverse discussion,” said Martins. “We need to have those people. We need to have a version of the metaverse that isn’t just created by technologists like us.”

The book also discusses governments and standards organizations furthering the metaverse through protecting users and ensuring interoperability respectively. A lot of the value of the metaverse will be created by users – much as with the current web, but more equitable.

“A true creator economy has been set in motion where communities are not only spawning creators but overall helping them to remain independent and relevant.[…] With several new platforms available in the gaming industry and in the so-called Web3 businesses, new avenues for distributing digital products and content are being envisioned and built.”

– Chapter Four: New Rules

Life and Work in the Metaverse

The largest single chapter in the book, “Metaversed Markets” is an exhaustive exploration of how different industries are using the extant iteration of the metaverse and how they may adapt to its development. While the bulk of Metaversed discussed opportunities in the metaverse and how to realize them, four chapters are dedicated exclusively to challenges in the metaverse.

“When living in a hybrid reality of digital and physical objects, spaces, and people that we seemingly use and own, will it all be real? The memories of our time immersed in those worlds won’t tell us otherwise. […] We can pick up our lessons learned of the risks involved and plan ahead for a better, positive metaverse. But, to do that, we need to first identify key challenges.”

– Chapter Nine: Understanding Reality

These challenges have some to do with technologies that haven’t yet been realized or optimized, but mainly pertain to the human experience of adapting to and living in the metaverse.

“The whole purpose is exactly that – to try to shed light on not just the potential of the metaverse […] but more than that to try to pass on the challenges of the metaverse,” said Martins. “Presenting the challenges is not negative – it’s facing those challenges […] At the end of the day, what we want is to contribute to a more ethical metaverse.”

Metaversed expresses hope that governments and organizations like the XR Safety Initiative will help to mitigate some risks. It also recognizes that a lot of responsibility will be put on users themselves.

“Even if it’s uncomfortable, we need to discuss how emerging tech can be monitored and regulated. We don’t have to cross our fingers and hope that big tech companies figure it out themselves (again).”

– Chapter Ten: Privacy and Safety in the Metaverse

“Unanswered Questions”

“Because we’re faced with so many unanswered questions and unsolved technical challenges, there should be no shame in saying ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘We don’t know’ when asked about the future […] for better or worse, we’re in this together.”

– Chapter Twelve: The New Humanity

The thing that struck me the most about Metaversed was its honesty. The authors are confident in their predictions but never present those predictions as already being facts. Overall, it feels like a conversation rather than a keynote or a sales pitch.

“At the end of the day, tech runs so quickly and changes so completely unexpectedly […] it’s sort of an exercise,” said Martins. “Hopefully what we can offer is more of the logic of thought.”

How “Metaversed” Came to Be

Wolfe and Martins have a long history, despite having yet to meet in person. The two began talking after Martins read “Marketing New Realities,” which Wolfe co-wrote with Cathy Hackl in 2017. Then, Martins was a guest speaker at Wolfe’s courses at New York University’s Steinhardt School. Martins was invited to write a book and knew who to talk to for a coauthor.

“It started with this opportunity that came about from the publisher. Around that time there was this huge push regarding the metaverse and I was thinking about doing something on the flipside, focusing entirely on the challenges,” said Martins. “I decided that that approach wouldn’t be the best possible way to explain to people who don’t know much or aren’t as involved.”

Wolfe’s coming on board provided the balance that Martins was looking for. It also expanded the vast network of experts that contributed their insights to Metaversed.

“He wanted to write this book about what can go wrong but I tend to be quite positive,” said Wolfe. “I also tend to look at how all of this applies to businesses.”

Despite being based in different countries and working on the book largely asynchronously, the two decided to write Metaversed with one voice, rather than passing chapters back and forth. While the book doesn’t feel divided (at least, not to people who don’t know the authors very closely) both of them have chapters that they feel they put more into.

“In the end, I think we were all very involved in doing the writing and – of course – the research,” said Martins. “There were chapters which were being run by one of us or by the other one, and some – particularly the chapters in the beginning – were very consensual.”

A Digestible Book, if Not in One Sitting

Metaversed: See Beyond the Hype is currently available on Amazon. The book, weighing in at over 300 pages, may or may not be a lot to read from cover to cover depending on where you are on your metaverse journey. However, the book was also designed to be incredibly navigable, making it easy to read or reread as you see fit.

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