It would be a shame not to shamelessly plug author (and anti-DRM activist) Cory Doctorow here. He has some really fun science fiction, and sells his audio books DRM-free through various sources.

Shamelessly, because lots of his protagonists are self-hosters of various types.

I use Downpour for Audiobooks. It is similar to Audible where audiobooks can be purchased individually, or there is a subscription that provides credits to purchase audiobooks. The audiobooks are drm-free and can be downloaded. I have not found a way to automate the download and transfer to my Audiobookshelf server, but I don’t mind doing it manually considering I average around two or three audiobooks a month.

Readarr and MaM.

Audible + OpenAudible. OpenAudible does “stuff” and you end up with audio files, that you can listen on most devices. Don’t know and care how they do this. Its not free but so is Audible.

When you have an active Audible subscription, you also have access to free Audiobooks. You can download and convert them too. But be aware, that Audible is rate limited. Had downloaded a ton of free audiobooks and after a short limit (maybe 1 hour), I got a long limit for around 24 hours. But I still use Audible. I just have it as a backup and this way I can give my family access to the books I have. But so far my mother only listen to the ones I got for free. I like Science Fiction a lot but my mother not.

A college who I recommended Audiobookshelf, has a subscription from a German only site (Thalia), where apparently the Audiobooks can be downloaded as MP3s. So far I prefer Audible, even with DRM, just because the availability. Not all books I listen to, are available on that site or much later.

Ripping childrens audiobooks from youtube with ylt-dlp is my least favorite because uploaders upload trash a lot, i.e. they let it repeat two times or even more often within one video.

I prefer subscribing to podcasts and downloading audiobooks via the usual means. There’s also good stuff on deezer which is very convenient.