Self-hosted audiobook and ebook servers: your own Audible and Kindle library
Audible and Kindle are convenient, and they're also a reminder that "buy" doesn't always mean "own" — books and audiobooks can be pulled, edited, or locked to one company's apps. If you'd rather your library belonged to you, two self-hosted apps cover the whole shelf: Audiobookshelf for audiobooks and podcasts, and Calibre-Web for ebooks.
Audiobookshelf — your own Audible
Audiobookshelf is a purpose-built audiobook and podcast server, and it's excellent. Point it at your audiobooks and it streams them to polished iOS and Android apps with the features that actually matter for listening: progress sync across devices (start in the car, finish on your phone), sleep timers, variable playback speed, bookmarks and chapters. It also manages podcasts, so it quietly replaces two apps at once.
- Native mobile apps with cross-device progress sync.
- Sleep timers, speed control, bookmarks, chapters — the real listening features.
- Audiobooks and podcasts in one library, multi-user.
Calibre-Web — your own Kindle library
Calibre-Web gives your ebook collection a clean, browsable web library you can read in the browser or send straight to your e-reader. Covers, metadata, search, and per-user accounts — a tidy front end for a book collection that's yours to keep, in open formats, with no account required to read what you already own.
- A clean web reader plus send-to-device for your e-reader.
- Organized with covers, metadata and search.
- Open formats — EPUB and friends, not a walled garden.
Why self-host your books?
- Nothing gets pulled or edited out from under you. The copy you have is the copy you keep.
- One library, every device — no juggling accounts and apps.
- Private. What you read and how far you got is nobody's analytics.
How to deploy them
Both are light. Each needs the app, a volume where your books or audiobooks live, and TLS on a domain so the mobile apps and e-readers can reach it. Getting the files onto the server is the only real effort; after that they scan and organize themselves. On a VPS that's a quick setup plus the usual updates and backups — or deploy Audiobookshelf and Calibre-Web in one click each and just bring the library.
Run both and you've replaced Audible and Kindle with a shelf that answers to you — streamed to every device, in open formats, with your place saved wherever you left off.
Deploy Audiobookshelf → · Deploy Calibre-Web → — or see the full catalog.