I had a viewer reach out to me recently asking about the best way to host audiobooks on a personal media server. And that question became the topic of my latest sponsored Plex video!
Plex does not have direct support for audiobooks but its music library feature works pretty well especially if the audiobooks you are ingesting have good data inside of their audio files. The most important setting is “store track progress” which will remember where you last left off. This is typically off by default for music libraries so you need to make sure that is enabled in the audiobook library you’re setting up.
Your audiobooks will playback just fine through the Plex app and Plexamp but some users have found third party apps that work with Plex to be a better option. The most popular app by far is Prologue on iOS which brings in some audiobook features missing in Plex apps. On Android Bookcamp and Chronicle are two similar options.
If you have a huge audiobook library you might want to check out this guide on Github with some additional scripts and agents you can install to help quickly organize a large block of audiobook files.
And if you’re looking for free audiobooks check out the Librivox project that is building a great library of books read by volunteers throughout the world. Oftentimes you can find multiple versions of the same book!