Part 5: The Pain of eBook Servers

This is Part 5 of an ongoing series detailing my experience dumbing down my phone, taking ownership of my data, and learning a lot about FOSS along the way. NOTE: These are living documents that will surely change with time!

This part is entirely dedicated to my attempts at replacing Google Books and PodcastAddict...

Books & Podcasts

One of the Google services I've used most has been Play Books. For years I've been taking advantage of the fact that it allowed uploading any eBook to the cloud, syncing across devices, offering a browser experience, a clean and simple app, and one of my favorite parts: highlights stored in book-specific docs synced to Drive. The organization aspect has generally been lacking, though the shelves introduced in the last few years have helped, and search is terrible. I may be missing something but I've never been able to search my library without my search also including results from the Play Store.

Over the years I've tried a variety of alternatives and none have come close. A lot of people recommend Calibre and Calibre-Web but... I hate Calibre. I've used the desktop app for conversion and de-DRMing in the past and I just can't imagine using it any more than I have to. That said, I haven't actually tried Calibre-Web and maybe I would be happy with it.

I've been hosting my audiobook library via AudioBookShelf, which has recently added ebook support, so for now I'm sticking with that. I haven't been entirely happy with the reading experience in the app, frequently when swipping to the next page I get stuck in an in-between space and have to swipe back and forth a few times to fix it. I also haven't loved the highlighting experience (which of course doesn't have the auto-export feature of Play Books) but it's also new functionality in general and a work in progress, so I'm doing a little wait-and-see. I might give Ubooquity and/or Kavita a try again at some point to see if I like them any better than I did a year or two ago when I last tried.

AudioBookShelf also has Podcast support, which I've recently started to use. I was a longtime Podcast Addict user but after annoying issues with handling local files I started using AudioBookShelf for all the podcasts I have locally that don't have working RSS feeds anymore. Now I've started moving active podcasts into it, too, and it's been working just fine. The UI could use some work but overall I'm happy with it.