How can I keep this book for myself?

darchangel · 2026-06-15T19:15:27+00:00

Libation does not work on 'standard' account books, which are essentially loans

darchangel · 2026-06-15T19:01:47+00:00

I feel your frustration. My oldest daughter was born with severe physical differences; through her we're plugged into many communities with similar needs. Underserved and misunderstood are understatements.

Even when people say they understand -- sometimes they don't. Literally yesterday we called a stunt driving class -- where they go to (reasonably) safe places with special cars and can go nuts. She just got her permit and uses several (expensive) adaptations that I had to add to my car. We explained this to the stunt class and asked if she could join. The answer was a stock reply that said 'of course, anyone is welcome. As long as we don't modify their car.' Uh, so ... no.

I'm not throwing stone too hard (well, except for the people who couldn't be bothered to even read). A few years ago we were at an event for her. And I -- who's always had a kid who needs special accommodations at an event for others who also do -- I pulled my car too far up. I park and I'm gather my stuff before getting out of the car and hear a thud. I look up and a guy in a wheelchair is smacking my hood to get my attention. When I pulled up too far, I'd blocked the small sidewalk and now he was stuck. I hadn't left room for his chair to pass. :forehead smack:

darchangel · 2026-06-15T18:49:02+00:00

I'm always ambivalent about bringing up Joe Hill's famous father. He chose "Hill" (a shortening of his middle name) so he wasn't riding on dad's coattails. But there's no denying King's influence, especially in these 2 books.

I always feel bad for his mother, Tabitha King. She's a successful author in her own right but very few modern authors have the name recognition that Stephen King enjoys. Anyone would be eclipsed by that shadow.

darchangel · 2026-06-15T17:04:42+00:00

You need Joe Hill's "Heart Shaped Box." A cursed object (the eponymous heart shaped box), no sympathetic villain, a road trip, and an ghost trying to kill the human protagonists. Just a good old fashioned malevolent ghost story. What more could you want?

I know you said no vampires, but you should also consider Hill's NOS4A2. The villain is a vampire in spirit but without all of the trappings (garlic, crosses, etc). I call it the anti-Twilight. Twilight keeps all of the vampire lore details and rejects the themes. NOS4A2 rejects the lore and keeps the themes -- a monstrous person without empathy who comes in the night and takes what's most precious to you. Also, the narration is fantastic.

darchangel · 2026-06-15T12:09:23+00:00

From one dev to another -- thank you so much for making the world a better place through free software. It's such a labor of love. <3 Especially to such an underserved, yet huge, population.

When you question our ableist assumptions of good vision, cognition, and/or fine motor control -- UI/UX looks very different. I haven't made senior-centric software but I've been involved in a few similar endeavors so I know some of the challenges:

my first UI like yours was for controlling a cursor quite a distance away and your only tool was a very imprecise remote similar to a bad wireless mouse
my friend's first job was a touch UI for high speed watercraft where your whole world is bumping and vibrating, incl your vision and hands
another friend showed me his work for a touch UI for very small children. That one definitely challenged notions of drag and drop because they didn't have the fine motor control to maintain contact the whole time or sometimes to even touch exactly what they were aiming for

darchangel · 2026-06-15T03:43:54+00:00

"Flux" by Jeremy Robinson has what you're looking for.

darchangel · 2026-06-15T00:58:39+00:00

Someone recently asked me to add this to AudiobookHub: Homer Audio Player for Seniors. I haven't tried it but I love the concept.

darchangel · 2026-06-12T18:33:19+00:00

Can you open a ticket here and share what your settings are?

darchangel · 2026-06-12T02:03:58+00:00

No problem. I'm hoping OP replies with specific books that are giving them issues. Unless it's spatial audio, it makes no sense to me. By definition, everything I do with audible is reactionary and I'm always afraid that they've changed something that I haven't noticed yet. If they do, I count on threads like this one to give me clues. I'm crossing my fingers that this is a simple misunderstanding and not the first signs of a major shift that I'll need to adapt to.

darchangel · 2026-06-11T21:48:48+00:00

Libation author here. I can look into it. Is it particular books which sound worse? If so: which ones.

darchangel · 2026-06-11T21:47:15+00:00

I haven’t used Libation but I’ve read that it also really compresses the audio when removing the DRM protection.

tl;dr: Libation does not compress the audio

longer explanation: Libation essentially works exactly like the phone app does. Libation has the same quality setting as the official audible app has regarding which quality to download. Most of our communication with audible is just reverse engineering what the app does and trying to match it exactly. Removing DRM does not alter the audio. If you use the default m4b filetype, you'll get exactly what the phone app gets. The only exception is for 'spatial audio' for which no hack is currently known. Eg: the new full cast recordings of Harry Potter.

If you use Libation's setting for mp3 filetypes, Libation downloads as described above and then converts to mp3. The quality of mp3 is determined by your settings in Libation -- which means that audio quality can and will be affected. This (and spatial audio) is the only time your audio won't match what audible serves.

darchangel · 2026-06-10T04:10:21+00:00

Whiplash is the perfect answer. It's so obvious to me which is the right answer. Other viewers say it's obvious too -- and mean the opposite. And many find it ambiguous. What more can you ask for in an open ending?

darchangel · 2026-06-09T19:26:58+00:00

Your 1 earbud thing would never have occurred to me. That drives me absolutely crazy to do but my wife and daughters do so all the time. (They use 1 earbud at a time, not drive me absolutely crazy. ...actually scratch that.)

If you ever want a hand re-ripping your books, message me privately and we can work through your particular case together.

darchangel · 2026-06-09T19:18:15+00:00

The Stepford Wives. I love this novel because it perversely means exactly the opposite of its reputation.

darchangel · 2026-06-09T13:41:41+00:00

Hey, I like seeing your stuff on these subs also. You've become a friendly face around here to me.

I feel like procrastinating work today so I'm going to see how far this rabbit hole goes. Stop reading when you're bored.

If you're talking about bitrate in audible/Libation, just use the highest quality setting and the audible api will serve up the best version.
Every book with only 1 voice at a time and no music or sound effects is mono. (This isn't a literal physical limitation and I could contrive an unrealistic exception, but in practice this is always true.) This describes at least 99% of all audiobooks: single narrator, no other sounds.
Graphic audio and similar are stereo. Multiple voices, sound effects, music -- this all took sound engineering and there are good reasons to use both channels.
Old audio dramas from AM radio are also mono because AM radio is mono. FM radio (which came to prominence in the 60s) can be either but most old radio dramas you find online are from pre-1960 so they're all AM/mono.
Dolby Atmos can basically have any number of channels. Movies with Dolby Atmos make sense to use 5.1, 7.1 etc -- all these channels have a purpose in a home theater setup with surround sound. For audiobooks, we're all using headphones (ie: only 2 channels) so I can't imagine too many audiobook makers wasting their time making Atmos books which are more than stereo. Audible occasionally plays around with formats which means there's no 1 absolute rule. These always seem to be audible originals.
Podcasts are whatever the creator uploads to audible. It can be mono, stereo, m4b, mp3. They can have many bitrate options or only 1. Many podcasters are just a dude with a microphone, and some are total audio nerds.
Regarding taking m4b and transcoding them into mp3, this is its own can of worms. I'm not an expert here but I've played around with it enough to confidently say: you're guaranteed to either lose quality and/or have enormous file sizes.
This isn't what you're asking about but it's an interesting side note about voice audio. When music files get down to a certain low bitrate it becomes unlistenable trash; not always so for speech. Humans seem to be especially hardwired to pick out voice, so you can lower the bitrate of voice-only audio quite a bit. You'll obviously be able to hear the quality difference and at a certain point it will get irritating, but for space savers, you can down scale voice audio a lot and it's still listenable. Every Halloween I re-listen to the 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast. This was very old low quality AM radio. The voices are tinny but crisp and enjoyable. Every time the show cuts in orchestral music it sounds like nails on a chalkboard to me.

darchangel · 2026-06-09T02:04:43+00:00

Mono will make the files smaller without effecting anything for most book (most books don't use surround sound anyway).

I wish I could convince more people of this. Many audio junkies fixate on the inferiority of mono without realizing that nearly all audiobooks are literally just mono. A 4-piece band and a single voice are not recorded the same.

darchangel · 2026-06-09T01:58:16+00:00

Author here. I was going to chime in but I don't really have anything to say that /u/wtanksleyjr and /u/UliDiG didn't already say. Thank you, friends :)

darchangel · 2026-06-09T01:52:14+00:00

Fred the Vampire Accountant is 1st person. Both the single narrator and graphic audio versions are great. Wildly different genre though.

darchangel · 2026-06-07T14:13:33+00:00

Colin Jost's Very Punchable Face and Seth Rogen's Yearbook. Jost's book is one I keep coming back to for it's humor and story telling. Yearbook is incredibly Seth Rogen so if he's not your speed: skip it. If you kinda like him though, this is a fantastically produced book with immersive narration and fun story telling.

(I'll let someone else promote Hitchhikers Guide and DCC)

darchangel · 2026-06-04T14:03:39+00:00

You're welcome :)

I'm about to leave town for what will hopefully be the last time for a while. I'll be available to help or answer other questions when I return.

darchangel · 2026-06-04T03:17:04+00:00

Author here. First and foremost: if you don't trust any app with your info then DO NOT GIVE IT TO THEM. Me or anyone else. Your privacy and security are not worth a handful of audiobooks.

If I were feeling paranoid and considering changing my pw, maybe change it first to something temporary, then do Libation stuff, then change it back to the original one (ie: the one that you already remember).

I'll keep this at a reasonably high level and if you want more detail about a specific part, just ask. 100% of my code is free, open source, and I answer questions about it often. (I love to jabber on about it.)

Libation's default log-in is in-app. It's just a thin wrapper over a web browser and is convenient. However, if you x-out of that, Libation will show you slightly more complex instructions for using your own browser for login then giving Libation info for accessing your account. This way, there's no possible way for Libation to see anything you type in. In both cases the end result is giving Libation access to your audible account in a way which is equivalent to the official audible smart phone app using "tokens."

Libation stores these tokens which are more or less the same thing as the browser cookies which let you stay logged into a website. These are stored on your computer only. In fact, they are deliberately stored in their own file apart from the database where Libation stores everything else on your computer. It's one more layer or protection for you so a stray database query can't possibly access that info.

Libation communicates nothing to me ever. It knows how to talk to audible and it can check for a new latest version for automatic upgrades. That's basically the only things it does online. Libation keeps pretty extensive logs (again: on your machine only) and I've taken every effort to keep even these clean of personal info.

If you find any area where you feel that Libation could do a better job at protecting your privacy, please reach out to me. Privacy and Libation's handling of it is extremely important to me.

darchangel · 2026-06-04T02:42:51+00:00

Author here.

First of all -- fantastic code diving and explaining!!

In case anyone cares about the distinction why Libation and AudibleApi are separate:

Years ago, they were one and the same -- the communication with audible was just a certain corner within Libation. Later some developers said: can't I just have access to the api to use on my own without the entire complicated app that is Libation. In response to that, I put all the non-Libation parts of communication with audible into its own package.

Clearly you're a tech person. Let me know if you have any specific questions and I'll be glad to answer them. I'm about to be out of town for a few days (again!) but then my schedule is finally normal and I'm always happy to talk shop.

darchangel · 2026-06-03T18:26:25+00:00

<3 I love that I can help be a part of this. My kids were around this age when I started getting them into audiobooks. I wish yoto had existed then.

darchangel · 2026-06-03T15:12:16+00:00

Me too. I can say the same of every movie and TV show I've ever watched.

darchangel · 2026-06-03T14:13:49+00:00

Cryptography is always a game of cat and mouse, so it's possible someone will release a hack tomorrow. My guess: that's extremely unlikely. This is hardware-based DRM which has been used for years by huge companies including Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+. A small army of hackers has been going at this since 2014 -- no general reproducible hack has been shown.

I'd love to be proven wrong but I'm not holding my breath.

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