Wot The Fsck You Say, Spotify?

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.

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.

https://archive.org/details/hhgttg-ab/

Read by Stephen Fry, no less.

Tbh as a quick fix your local library almost certainly has this audio book. Finish your book then you can look into piracy.

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.

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.

Audiobookbay, My Anonamouse, Audiobookshelf

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.

libraries let you check out audiobooks for free

Fuck Spotify I would demand a refund then do a chargeback if they refuse. This is fucked.

What the fuck lmao

Why does anyone use shitify

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?

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

The enshitification is real!

Library Card

Depends on your local library but I have for example unlimited E Books included.

1"Oh god! Some of our users are leaving because our service sucks now!"

2"Should we improve our service?"

3"Of course not! We should just make it more restrictive and raise prices!"

2"Yeah! Raise prices to make up for lost customers!"

1"yeah! no one will pirate anything if we just raise prices and make everything way more inconvenient!"

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"

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.

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.

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

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.

Enshitification!

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I have the whole series as DRM-free MP3. Let me know if you want it.

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.

An audiobook, of an ebook, of a book, adaped from a radio play... ok then?

fsck.ext4

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

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

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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

Get on a plexshare/emby share /appbox with a good ebook selection. Save your time.

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

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

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.

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Keep embracing digital only, assholes... This is what you're signing up for.