Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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.

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"

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!"

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.