Abooks

Abooks is a self-hosted audiobook player built for people who'd rather own their library than rent it. Point it at your personal Plex server and get a purpose-built audiobook experience — chapters, resumable playback, and offline downloads — without the ads, subscriptions, or algorithmic recommendations of a commercial audiobook app.

Your Plex library, done right
Browse your existing Plex audiobook collection and download titles for offline listening. Chapter navigation, accurate resume position, and a real "currently listening" progress bar — all synced back to your server.

More than just your own shelf
Search and download free, public-domain audiobooks straight from the Internet Archive and LibriVox — thousands of professionally and volunteer-narrated titles, no library required.

Read along while you listen (rolling out now)
Pair any audiobook with its EPUB and follow the text in a built-in reader while the narration plays. Abooks lines up the audio chapters with the ebook's table of contents and estimates where you are in the text. Jump from the audio to the matching spot in the book, or from the book back to the audio. If the automatic match is off, you can fix it: choose which audio chapter a section starts at, adjust the sync, or swap or unlink the ebook. Adjust text size, line spacing, and theme (system, light, sepia, or dark) to suit you. Ebooks can be downloaded on their own, and a book you turn into an audiobook keeps its EPUB for read-along. This feature is still in the experimental phase as the sync function works well with similar chapter names, but not well when the ebook and abook have completely different names (ie "Chapter 1" vs. ). We are releasing it with the knowledge it works in the best case scenarios.

Turn ebooks into audiobooks
Have an EPUB but no narrator? Abooks can synthesize one. Pull public-domain ebooks from the Internet Archive, or connect your own Calibre library, and have your device's on-device text-to-speech engine read it aloud — saved as a real downloadable audiobook you can listen to anywhere, no internet required after that.

Built for how you actually listen
• Skip back 10s / forward 30s, previous/next chapter, and playback speed control
• Full Android Auto support with proper transport controls
• Rich media notifications that show your actual controls, not a placeholder
• Standalone mode: skip Plex entirely and just play whatever's in your Audiobooks folder

Wear OS companion
Send downloaded books straight to your watch over Wi-Fi and listen untethered from your phone — no cellular streaming or phone required once sent to watch.

Private by design
No accounts, no ads, no analytics, no subscription. Abooks talks only to the servers you tell it to — your Plex server, your Calibre server, and the public archive.org/LibriVox APIs you explicitly opt into. Ebooks and your reading position stay on your own devices.

Requires a self-hosted Plex Media Server for your primary library. Internet Archive, LibriVox, and Calibre sources are optional and independently toggleable in Settings. Read-along requires an EPUB you own or have attached.