Playing back Libby and Audible on Macs and iPhones

Turns out that with iPhones, it’s pretty easy to play back audio books for Libby which is the friendly version of audio playback with Overdrive or with the Audible application.

But, if you have a Mac, then things get a little harder since there are no dedicated Audible or Libby applications for the Mac. You could pay $5 for a third party Audible player but the best and simplest way to do it is to:

Convert the Audible book to Apple Books. This does authentication with Apple to Audible and you can play books back there. The main problem I’ve found is that the chapter settings are a little different, but it definitely works. As a side benefit, if you decide to do this, you just hit download fro the Audible.com site and then click on the resulting encrypted Audible file and then Authorize Books to read
Convert Libby.com into a WebConnect Site. Well, Libby actually has an online reader that you start from your browser, but the easier way is to install WebConnect which encapsulates web applications and makes them look like standalone Mac Apps. This way, you don’t have more windows open. Just run brew install webconnect and then search for Libby and it creates a Libby Mac applications for you