Extra Audiobooks

The Extra Audiobooks panel lets you browse and subscribe to free, public-domain audiobooks from LibriVox and have their chapters downloaded and synced to your devices automatically.

No account, API key, or credentials are required — LibriVox is free and open.

What it does

• Search & Add — Search the LibriVox catalog by title or author and subscribe in one click.
• Cover grid — Subscribed books appear as a cover grid, each tagged Extra, showing chapter count and total runtime.
• Download-on-sync — Chapters are not pre-downloaded. They are fetched on demand the first time you sync a device that includes the book, keeping disk use to what you actually transfer.
• Device sync — Chapters (and the book cover) are copied into each device's Audiobooks folder, organised one folder per book.
• Cover artwork — LibriVox feeds rarely include artwork, so covers are looked up automatically from Google Books / Open Library, with a manual picker if you want a different one.

How it works

Subscribing

1. Open the Extra Audiobooks tab in the sidebar.
2. Click Search & Add.
3. Type a title or author. Author searches also retry on the last word, so "Philip K. Dick" matches even though LibriVox only indexes authors by last name.
4. Click a result to subscribe. The book's chapter list is pulled from its LibriVox RSS feed and the cover is fetched in the background — it swaps in live once ready, no manual refresh needed.

Chapter download states

Open a book to see its detail modal with per-chapter state:

State	Meaning
pending (○)	Not yet downloaded.
downloading (…)	Currently being fetched.
ready (✓)	Downloaded and available for device sync.
failed (✕)	Download was attempted but errored.
skipped (−)	Will not be downloaded or synced.

Because audiobooks use download-on-sync, most chapters stay pending until the first sync that includes the book, at which point they download and become ready.

Device sync

Audiobooks sync through the normal Sync panel, just like podcasts:

• Full sync — Include audiobooks via the Audiobooks content toggle.
• Custom sync — Tick specific books in the Audiobooks category box, in either Include or Exclude mode.

On the device, chapters land at:

<device root>/<Audiobooks folder>/<Author - Title>/NN <Chapter Title>.ext

with the book cover copied alongside as cover.<ext>. The NN prefix preserves chapter order in players that sort by filename. Chapters already on the device are skipped on subsequent syncs (tracked in a device_audiobook_synced table); if a destination path changes, the old file is cleaned up and the chapter re-copied.

Covers

After you subscribe, iPodRocks resolves a cover automatically from Google Books / Open Library and stores it locally. If the automatic match is wrong or missing, open the book and click Search cover to pick a different cover from candidate results.

How to work with it

1. Subscribe to a few books from the LibriVox catalog.
2. Enable audiobooks for the target device (Full sync content toggle, or tick the books in Custom sync).
3. Sync — Chapters download on demand and copy to the device's Audiobooks folder.
4. Remove a book — Open it and click Remove Book to unsubscribe and delete its local chapter files.

Rocksy

Rocksy can manage Extra Audiobooks for you from the chat:

• "Find audiobooks by Jules Verne" → audiobook_search
• "Subscribe to Pride and Prejudice" → audiobook_subscribe
• "What audiobooks do I have?" → audiobook_list_subscriptions
• "Remove that book" → audiobook_unsubscribe (asks you to confirm first)
• "Find a better cover for it" → audiobook_refresh_cover

Tips

• Audiobooks are free and public-domain — there is no quota or login.
• If a chapter shows failed, sync again to retry the download.
• Because chapters download on sync, the first sync of a long book can take a while; subsequent syncs only copy what's new.
• Use Custom sync → Exclude to sync your whole library minus a specific audiobook box set.