Lee Hutchinson’s article this week about his move to self host his audiobook collection made it straight to the top of my digital to-do list.

I enjoy audiobooks more than most of my family, but I still manage the library for the seven of us, and I had until now failed to work out a good sharing solution.

I had previously gone through this with Kindle ebooks, where Amazon has a convoluted way of sharing books with your family, but I eventually gave up and got everyone a Kobo. I copy the entire family library onto everyone’s device and update them from time to time as we get new books.

Audiobooks take up a bit more space—my library is more than 100 GB—so that has made them a harder problem to solve. And Audible only lets you share your purchases with one adult member of your family.

Until now, my less-than-ideal solution has been to store the books in a shared iCloud folder and listen to them with the BookPlayer app. But this is a very manual process since you have to add books to the app, which brings up an iCloud picker, and then you have to wait in the picker for the file to download to your device before you can add it to the app. There seems to be a new $5/month BookPlayer Pro subscription that manages syncing for you, but I think it is cross-device sync, not cloud storage. Also, it is labeled Beta for now.

Audiobookshelf, plus a client app like plappa (which has an adorable icon, CarPlay, and much more customizability than Audible) are exactly what I needed. I had no issues installing and running the server software on my home server. I dumped my set of audiobooks into a folder. I didn’t bother with any fancy organization, and it found everything anyway. I used the web app to group the books into series. I downloaded photos of the authors for the by-author view.

I feel like the bar is still pretty high to get stuff like this working, but it makes me nostalgic for the days when running computer software gave you the freedom to customize, mix and match applications, and make things just how you like them. I am tired of the full-service, lock-you-in, our-way-or-the-highway model of computer software.