YOU’LL NEED THIS

A PC OR SERVER RUNNING UBUNTU, DEBIAN OR DOCKER plus Audio book shelf and a collection of digital audiobooks

1 SET UP YOUR FOLDERS

If you’re not familiar with docker, start by checking out the four-page tutorial in the October 2022 issue of Maximum PC. There, we set up a dedicated ‘dockeruser’ user for security purposes, and we’ll be using that user for this tutorial. Let’s start by setting up any required folders. Assuming you followed our September 2022 build feature, you’ll be accessing your server through the cockpit web interface. Log into your dockeruser account, select Terminal in the left-hand pane, and issue the following commands:

>> This creates the /home/dockeruser/containers/ audiobookshelf folder, which is where your Audiobookshelf settings will reside. Now create two more subfolders inside here:

>> You don’t need to transfer any actual audiobooks or podcasts into this folder—they can be stored elsewhere on your system if you prefer. In our example, we’ll be storing them in separate folders within dockeruser’s home folder. If you’re wondering where you can source your audiobooks from, check out the sidebar on page 69.

IF YOU LOVE LISTENING to audiobooks, you may have accumulated a huge pile of CDs over the years or amassed an Audible library to be proud of. But why not convert those audiobooks into your own personal streaming library, hosted on your server and open to all your friends and family? Building such a library has traditionally been challenging—some have attempted to incorporate audiobooks into existing media servers such as Plex, while dedicated audiobook servers have been thin on the ground.

Until recently, there was one practical choice for standalone audiobook streaming, and that was Booksonic (https://booksonic.org/). But in the space of a year, Audiobookshelf (www. audiobookshelf.org) has swooped in, offering a powerful, yet user-friendly server to give audiobooks (and podcasts) the streaming platform they deserve.

Audiobookshelf is available as a standalone tool for Linux—most notably Ubuntu and Debian—but it also ships as a docker instance, which makes it the perfect candidate for adding to a server PC, such as the one we built in our September 2022 issue.

In this tutorial, then, we’ll run you through installing Audiobookshelf through docker, reveal how to get your audiobook server up and running, plus make it accessible to friends and family via the medium of any major phone, tablet, or computer.

–NICK PEERS

2 INSTALL AUDIOBOOKSHELF

Next, open a text editor on your main PC and add the lines