Download Your Audible Books

Stephan Burns | Sep 28, 2024
PSA

All books you wish to download this way, you have to have purchased through audible.com these cannot be books obtained by a subscription. This only works with books you have purchased.

Download Your Books

  1. Assuming that Audible hasn’t gotten rid of this feature goto audible.com
  2. Click on library at the top.
  3. Beside each book their should be a download icon. Download each book you want to preserve.
    1. If there is a drop down that has parts listed pick the full option. This will download the entire book instead of each part separately.

audible download button

Convert Your Books To A DRM Free File Format

Sadly Audible doesn’t allow you to download DRM free copies of your books. So we have to obtain your accounts decryption key. These are also called activation bytes. There are two methods of doing this. One uses a table and a cracking tool to extract the key from one of the books you downloaded. The other way downloads the key from audibles servers using your account credentials.

Huge shout out to inAudible-NG for creating both of these amazing tools.

Using A Cracking Table

  1. Download ffmpeg version 2.8.1 or higher. You can Download it from here
  2. The cracking table repository can be found here. Download it from the website or clone it using git.
    1. Download it by clicking the green Code button.
    2. Download ZIP
  3. Copy your book file into the cracking table folder. tables/
  4. Use ffprobe to get the SHA1 checksum from the file. ffprobe test.aax
  5. Then copy your key and replace your_key with the key we just copied and run ./rcrack . -h your_key. This can take a while depending on your hardware.
  6. Copy your activation bytes. It’ll be the numbers and letters after hex:.

Your all set to Convert Your Books!

Audible Activator

  1. Download and install python
  2. pip install selenium requests chromedriver
  3. Make sure you have Chromium or Google Chrome installed.
  4. Download the repo here.
    1. Download it by clicking the green Code button.
    2. Download ZIP
  5. Open the folder and run ./audible-activator.py
  6. Type in your username and password. That’s it in the output is your activation bytes.

Your all set to Convert Your Books!

Convert Your Books

Now that the hard part of getting your activation bytes is over we get to convert your books.

One Off

Replace your_key with your activation bytes from earlier.

ffmpeg -activation_bytes your_key -i test.aax test.mp3

Batch Converting

To do batch converting use this script. It’ll convert all the .aax files in the current directory into .mp3 files. It puts all the finished .aax files in a folder so you can start and stop this whenever you want.

  1. Replace your_key with your activation bytes from earlier.
  2. nano convert.sh paste in the below script.
  3. chmod +x convert.sh
  4. bash convert.sh
mkdir finished
for f in *.aax; 
do 
    ffmpeg -activation_bytes your_key -i "$f" "${f%.aax}".mp3;  
    mv $f finished/$f
done

So I Have My Books Now What?

That’s a good question. You can play them with any audio player but you will quickly realize that the audio player doesn’t hold your position between sessions. There aren’t many audio players out there that will hold your position like you want them to. Podcast players will but they usually don’t allow you to use local files. You could use something to generate you an RSS feed but thankfully you don’t have to. Someone created an audible like streaming software that you can self host. It’s called Audiobookshelf. I highly recommend this software. As of writing it’s IOS app is still in Beta but it is supposed to be released very soon. It might be released as your reading this.

Setting up the Audiobookshelf server is out of scope for this article. Their documentation is quite good and you should be able to get it setup pretty easily if you have any experience with docker.