Firstly thank you all for your feedback and list of features!
While I am still working to see if/when we could add this to our Personal Media roadmap, I wanted to take a stab at summarising what minimum changes would be needed to Plex Media Server to improve things as they are today;
- Audiobook library type with book-related metadata fields (Narrator, Author, Series, Publisher)
- Local metadata agent (sidecar xml files and/or reading M4B metadata)
- Recognising the chapters embedded in M4B files
- Save progress at book level (like which track in album/chapter in file)
- Support for books with an audio file per chapter
- Progress syncing (much like watched progress for videos)
- Client support (Plexamp? Mobile apps? Plex Web?)
One item not in the list above is online metadata for Audiobooks. 3rd party agents such as Audiobooks.bundle pull from a non-public Audible API. My understanding is we would not be able to do this without an agreement to use an offical API.
Perhaps this could be an “Advanced” library type that only supports local metadata (embedded/sidecar XML) as a solution to not having an online source?
