Library & Browsing

Browse, search, filter, and organize your audiobook library in FableFrog with five browse modes, playlists, series tracking, and more.

Home Screen

The Home tab is your personalized dashboard. It displays server-powered shelves like Continue Listening, Recently Added, and Discover, giving you quick access to what matters most. Below the shelves you'll find:

• Favorites: a quick-access row of books you've marked as favorites.
• Weekly stats: a snapshot of your listening time for the current week, with a progress indicator if you've set a listening goal.
• Upcoming books: a row of new and announced releases in series you follow. The row can highlight itself when books have been announced since you last opened it - see New Release Emphasis.
• Release day banners: when a book in a followed series releases today, a celebratory banner appears with cover art, title, series name, and an "Open in Audible" link. The banner surfaces immediately on cold launch (not just after the next home refresh) and includes books that already landed in your library so you don't miss the day-of moment. If multiple books release on the same day, they rotate automatically. Dismiss a banner and the next one takes its place.

The Home toolbar also includes an inline library switcher — tap your current library name to switch to another library on the same server without leaving the Home tab. All browse tabs, history, the mini player, and stats re-scope to the newly selected library automatically.

The Home screen refreshes automatically when you open the app and maintains a real-time connection to your server via Socket.io, so changes on the server (new books added, progress synced from another device) appear without manual refreshing.

Browse Modes

FableFrog provides five distinct ways to explore your library, each accessible from the browse section:

Books

The default grid view showing every audiobook in your library. Each cover displays progress indicators and optional status icons (downloaded, finished, or a "Streaming" label when a book isn't downloaded so you always know whether a tap will play from the network or local storage). Tap any cover to open the book detail page. Toggle Collapse Series from the toolbar menu to group all books belonging to a series into a single compact row — great for libraries with lots of long series. Tap a collapsed series to jump into its detail view.

Authors

A list of all authors in your library, sorted by first name. Tap an author to see their detail page with a biography (if available on the server) and a list of all their books in your collection.

Series

Browse all series in your library. Each series entry shows the number of books you own and your overall progress. Tap a series to see all books in order, with clear indicators for which ones you've started, finished, or haven't begun yet. Filter to just the series you follow with the Following filter chip at the top of the tab. Long-press any series card for a context menu with quick actions: view the series, search on Audible, follow or unfollow, rate, add the series to a playlist, or add all books in the series to a playlist at once.

Series Your Server Hides

Audiobookshelf has a library setting called Hide single book series. With it on, the server leaves one-book series out of the series list that FableFrog reads series identity from, so those books reach the app carrying a name and nothing else to link them together.

FableFrog recovers them from a source that setting doesn't affect. With that in place:

• Collapse Series groups them under the real series name instead of showing one row per book
• Their series pages open to the books they hold instead of reporting No Books
• Upcoming Releases can match them to your library instead of reporting that it couldn't
• Their names no longer carry the book number twice ("Azarinth Healer #1 #1")

You don't need to change the server setting. This works either way.

Narrators

A list of narrators extracted from your library metadata, sorted by first name. Tap a narrator to see every book they've narrated, making it easy to find more work from a voice you enjoy.

Genres

Browse your library organized by genre tags. Tap any genre to see all matching books, then filter and sort within that subset.

Filtering and Sorting

Every browse mode supports filtering and sorting to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Progress Filters

Filter your library by listening status:

• Not Started: books you haven't begun
• In Progress: books you're currently listening to
• Finished: books you've completed

Combine progress filters with genre filters to narrow results further. Active filters appear as visual chips at the top of the browse view, and you can tap any chip to remove it.

Sort Options

Sort your library by title, author, date added, duration, year published, or last listened, in ascending or descending order. The available sort options vary slightly by browse mode. For example, the Series view offers sorting by series name and book count. Each sort view remembers your last direction independently, so switching between "Title A–Z" and "Added newest first" doesn't reset your preferences.

Alphabetical Index Bar

For large libraries, the index bar along the right edge of the screen lets you jump instantly to any letter. Tap or drag along the bar to scroll to that section. The index bar is available on the Books, Authors, Narrators, and Series tabs. Tapping a letter eagerly loads any remaining pages so jumping to "W" in a huge library doesn't stall.

Cache-First Loading

Library, Home, Favorites, Author, Narrator, Series, and Book detail all render instantly from cache on re-entry with a silent background refresh — no spinner, no wait. Filter and sort changes apply optimistically, and every tab supports pull-to-refresh when you want to force a fresh fetch.

Search

The search function works across your entire library in real time. As you type, results are filtered by title, author, narrator, and genre. Search is available from the main browse view and works within any active filter combination.

Book Detail Page

Tapping any book opens its full detail page, which includes:

• Cover art displayed prominently at the top
• Metadata: author, narrator, series, genres, year published, publisher
• Description: the full book description from your server
• Chapter list: all chapters with individual durations. Tap any chapter to jump directly to it in the player
• Progress bar: your current position in the book
• Listening sessions: a history of when and how long you've listened
• Ratings: your rating and any review you've written
• Quick actions: play, download, add to playlist, mark as finished, rate, and more

Long-press any book cover anywhere in the app to access a context menu with quick actions: navigate to the author, series, or narrator page, mark as finished, add to a playlist, rate the book, clear listen history, and more. Series cards also support long-press context menus with actions like follow/unfollow, rate, search on Audible, and batch-add all books to a playlist.

Book Metadata Editor

Edit a book's metadata directly from the app without opening your Audiobookshelf web interface. From the book detail page, tap Edit to modify:

• Title and subtitle
• Author and narrator
• Series name and book number
• Genres and tags
• Description
• Publisher and year published

Changes are saved to your Audiobookshelf server and immediately reflected across all connected clients. This is useful for correcting mismatched metadata, adding missing series information, or cleaning up your library on the go.

Playlists

Playlists let you create custom listening queues for any purpose: road trip lineups, themed collections, or a simple "up next" list. Playlists are stored on your device because the Audiobookshelf API does not support them. They persist across sign-out and are tied to your account, so they're restored when you sign back in.

You can have as many playlists as you like, and they hold books you own. For a single blessed to-read queue that can also hold books you don't own yet, see the Reading List instead.

Creating a Playlist

Tap the Playlists section in the library and create a new playlist with a name of your choice. You can also add a book to a playlist directly from the book detail page or context menu.

Managing Playlists

• Add books from any book's detail page or context menu. You can also add all books in a series at once from the series context menu.
• Remove books by swiping on them within the playlist view.
• Reorder books with drag and drop to set your preferred listening sequence.
• Delete a playlist entirely when you no longer need it. Deleting a playlist does not affect the books themselves.

Favorites

Mark any book as a favorite by tapping the heart icon on its detail page or through the context menu. Favorites appear in a dedicated row on the Home screen for quick access. Tap the heart again to unfavorite a book. Favorites are stored on your device because the Audiobookshelf API does not support them. They persist across sign-out and are tied to your account.

Series Tracking

FableFrog helps you stay on top of multi-book series with its series tracking feature.

Following Series

Tap the Follow button on any series detail page to start tracking it. Followed series are monitored for upcoming releases, and FableFrog checks external data sources for release information. You can follow up to 3 series for free; Premium unlocks unlimited series tracking. Series following is stored on your device because the Audiobookshelf API does not support it. It persists across sign-out and is tied to your account.

Bulk Follow / Unfollow

Open Upcoming Releases, tap the 3-dot menu, and choose Manage Followed Series to see every series in your current library on a single page. Each row shows the series cover with a single-tap follow toggle. The page supports:

• Cross-field search across title, author, narrator, and the titles of contained books
• Alphabet scroll along the right edge for instant jump to any letter
• Recent follows chips in the header showing your three most recently followed series as quick-jump shortcuts
• Cache-first loading so the list paints instantly on re-entry, with a background refresh that fills in covers as they download

This is the fastest way to seed the app with a stack of series at once, or to clean up your follow list after a binge.

Ready to Listen

Everything else on the Upcoming Releases page is about books you don't have yet. Ready to Listen is the section about the ones you do: for every series you follow, the earliest book you own and haven't finished.

It sits just below Upcoming, and each row shows:

• The series name and the book's title
• A progress bar and % complete if you've started it, or Not started if you haven't
• N more in this series when there are further unfinished books behind it

One row per series, not per book - following 15 series with 8 unread books in each would otherwise render 120 rows that duplicate your Library. Tap a row to open the book.

If you're several books behind, that one row hides the rest of them. Open the 3-dot menu on the Upcoming Releases page and turn on Show All Books Per Series to expand every series to each book you own and haven't finished. The books stay grouped under their series and the series keep the same order, so the page reads the same way - it's just longer. The setting is a per-device display choice, not an account setting.

A few details worth knowing:

• Finished means finished. A book you explicitly marked finished stays out of the section even if you stopped at 40%.
• Lowest book number wins, with unnumbered entries sorting last, so a companion novella never displaces the real next book.
• Ordering is by actionability. Books already underway come first, most recently listened at the top, then the untouched series alphabetically.
• It doesn't wait on Audible. The section is built from your library and your local progress, with no external lookup, so it appears as soon as it's ready rather than after the release check finishes.

Status Categories

Books in a followed series are categorized into clear statuses:

• Upcoming: announced but not yet released
• Available Now: released but not yet in your library
• Up to Date: you've finished or own all currently available books

Standalone Books

Many series include companion novels, side stories, novellas, and other entries that don't have a numbered position in the series. FableFrog detects these standalone entries and tracks them alongside numbered sequels so you never miss a release.

• Upcoming standalones always appear in your upcoming list, ensuring you don't miss pre-release entries.
• Available standalones can be shown or hidden using the Include Standalones toggle in the toolbar. Standalone books are labeled with a "Standalone" badge so they're easy to distinguish from numbered entries.
• The toggle preference is saved per server, so each Audiobookshelf connection remembers your choice.
• Toggling is instant — no network refetch required.

Inline Series Releases

Upcoming and available releases now appear inline on the series detail page, right alongside the books you already own. This gives you a complete picture of a series without navigating to the upcoming releases screen.

Status Badges on Series Rows

Every book row in a series detail view shows status badges directly on the cover — download, favorite, abandoned, and finished — so you can scan a long series at a glance instead of tapping into every book to check where you stand.

Hiding Upcoming Books

If you're not interested in a specific upcoming book, you can hide it from your feed. Hidden books are moved to a collapsible section at the bottom so you can unhide them later if you change your mind.

Release Notifications

Opt in to iOS push notifications in Settings > Notifications and FableFrog keeps you posted on the series you follow - even when the app isn't open. A master toggle requests iOS notification permission and shows a friendly reminder if permission is denied. Granular per-type toggles then let you choose exactly what you hear about:

• Added to Your Library - a book from a followed series landed on your server and is ready to play. (Through 1.12 this was called New Book in Followed Series. Only the label changed in 1.13; your existing setting carried over untouched.)
• New Upcoming Release - a book was announced in a followed series, often months before anyone can buy it. On by default.
• Release Date Changed - an announced date moved. Off by default.
• 2 Weeks Before Release and 1 Week Before Release - heads-up reminders so you can finish what you're listening to and clear the runway.
• Release Day Alerts - a book you're waiting on is out today.

Release-day detection runs in the background, paginates long series so entries don't slip past, and reschedules itself on app launch and on widget refresh. Scheduling state is kept per-server (per-tenant) so notifications stay straight if you connect to multiple Audiobookshelf instances. Unfollow a series, or have Audible drop a book from its listing, and the pre-release and release-day reminders already scheduled for those books are withdrawn instead of arriving months later for a book you stopped waiting on.

Announcement Alerts

New Upcoming Release and Release Date Changed are the two alerts about books that aren't in your library and may not exist yet. They come from the same Audible check that fills your Upcoming Releases page, so they cost no extra network work.

• An announcement notifies once. A book is identified by its ASIN, and the first sighting is the only one that counts. Seeing the same book on every check afterward is normal and silent.
• A date has to move by a week to count. Dates slide constantly, and small corrections aren't news. FableFrog compares against the date it last told you about, not the last one it saw, so four two-day slips can still add up to one alert.
• Three per check, then a digest. A single check sends at most three alerts of each type. Past that they collapse into one line - "and 6 more were announced" - rather than a stack you have to clear.
• A single-book alert carries the cover. An alert about one book attaches that book's cover art, so you can tell what it is from the lock screen. A digest about several doesn't, because there's no honest single image for several books.
• Switching storefronts doesn't spam you. A check that suddenly turns up a very large number of unseen books is treated as a changed catalog rather than 40 simultaneous announcements. FableFrog records them silently and notifies normally from then on.
• The record is private and local. What FableFrog has seen and told you about is stored on your device, scoped to the server you're signed in to, cleared on sign-out, and excluded from backups.

iOS gives that background check a limited slice of time, and FableFrog keeps every result it has already collected when the slice runs out. Following a long list of series costs you nothing: each series records what it last saw, so it notifies you once for a new book and doesn't repeat itself. A check that runs in the background renews your server session as it goes, so alerts keep arriving rather than stopping quietly a few days after you last opened the app.

How Release Data Is Fetched

Release dates for books that aren't in your library yet come from Audible's public series pages. FableFrog reads them the way a browser would, and paces itself deliberately:

• Each followed series keeps its own refresh interval, somewhere between 18 and 24 hours, so a stack of followed series doesn't all come due at the same moment.
• Requests are spread out, with longer pauses at intervals rather than a steady drumbeat.
• A page that can't be read - an anti-bot interstitial, a CAPTCHA, anything unparseable - counts as a failure, not as a series with no books in it. This matters: reading a failure as an empty series is what once made every series you follow report Up to Date at once and silently stopped your alerts.
• Long series are paged through using the book count the page itself advertises, so nothing past the first page is missed.
• A release date is treated as a calendar day, not a moment in time. A book announced for December 6 reads December 6 wherever you are, and the countdown, the reminders and the calendar event all agree on it.

Pull to refresh ignores all of the above and re-checks everything immediately. It's a thing you asked for, so it happens now.

Upcoming Book Detail

Tap any upcoming or available-now book to open a detail page showing cover art, title, series and book number, author, narrator, duration, book description, series navigation, and release date. Upcoming books display a live per-second countdown timer to the release date. A "View on Audible" or "View on Goodreads" link (based on your external link provider setting) lets you jump directly to the book's listing. Books without cover art show a placeholder image.

Tap Add to Calendar on any upcoming book detail to drop the release date into your iOS calendar so you'll get a reminder when the book lands.

Tap Add to Reading List to queue a book you don't own yet. It's added by ASIN and becomes playable on its own once the book appears in your library — see Reading List. To have announced books queue themselves without your tapping anything, turn on Add Upcoming Releases.

External Book Link Provider

FableFrog lets you choose between Audible and Goodreads as your default external link provider. Go to Settings > External Link Provider to set your preference. Every "View on..." link throughout the app — upcoming releases, context menus, release day banners — respects your choice.

Unfollowing

Tap the Follow button again on the series page to stop tracking a series. This removes it from your upcoming books notifications, and any pre-release or release-day reminders already scheduled for its books are taken back.

Abandoned Books & Series

If you've decided to stop listening to a book or following a series, you can mark it as abandoned. This helps keep your library focused on what you actually want to listen to.

Abandoning a Book

Mark any book as abandoned from its detail page or context menu. Abandoned books display a visual indicator (a slashed bookmark icon) on their covers throughout the library. Abandoning a book automatically removes it from your favorites, since the two states are mutually exclusive, and drops it from your Reading List if it was queued there.

Abandoning a Series

Mark an entire series as abandoned from the series detail page or context menu. When you abandon a series, FableFrog asks whether you want to abandon just the series itself or all of its books too. Series cards display a slashed bookmark icon when abandoned.

Filtering and Viewing

• Abandoned filter chip: an "Abandoned" filter appears in the library browse view for both books and series, letting you see only abandoned items.
• Hide Abandoned setting: toggle "Hide Abandoned" in Settings to exclude abandoned items from your library by default.
• Abandoned list: a dedicated list view shows all abandoned series and books organized in sections.

Un-Abandoning

To un-abandon a book or series, open its detail page or context menu and remove the abandoned status. The visual indicators are removed and the item reappears in your normal library views.

Abandoned book status is stored on your server via a playlist. Abandoned series status is stored locally on your device because the Audiobookshelf API does not support series in playlists. Both persist across sign-out and are tied to your account.

Ratings and Reviews

Rate any audiobook on a 1 to 5 star scale (in half-star increments) directly from the book detail page. You can also write a text review of up to 5,000 characters to capture your thoughts. Ratings sync to your Audiobookshelf server, so they're visible from any client. You can update or remove your rating at any time. Your ratings also persist locally across sign-out, tied to your account.

You can also rate entire series from the series detail page. Series ratings are stored locally on your device, making them a personal reference for how you feel about a series overall.