bookpeek

bookpeek scans the opening seconds of an audiobook and extracts the spoken title, title candidates, authors, and narrators without requiring an online AI service or API key. Title candidates can come from Audible-style introductions, ID3 tags, filenames, folders, and chapter text, with scores indicating which candidate was preferred.

Online results are grouped by provider under online_matches, with separate authors and works arrays. Goodreads author results with zero similarity are omitted when any positive-scoring author exists; otherwise authors with at least ten works are retained as a fallback.

The result's top-level title, author, and narrators fields contain the final values after provider validation. The nested extraction object remains the unmodified transcript/metadata extraction.

Audnexus results appear under online_matches.audnexus.works and include matched Audible identifiers, authors, narrators, region, and confidence scores. Verified narrator names are also collected under online_matches.audnexus.narrators.

Install

First-time setup

There are only two steps:

1. Install ffmpeg, which decodes audiobook files:

 # macOS with Homebrew
 brew install ffmpeg

 # Debian/Ubuntu
 sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg

2. Run the installer:

 ./install.sh

The installer bootstraps Poetry if necessary, installs the default Whisper setup plus online enrichment, downloads spaCy's English model, and creates ~/.local/bin/bookpeek. If ffmpeg is missing, it prints the appropriate installation commands and exits. Add ~/.local/bin to your PATH if the bookpeek command is not found.

Optional installation choices

Most users should use the default command above. Use these only when you need a different setup:

# Smaller CPU-oriented Vosk engine instead of Whisper.
BOOKPEEK_EXTRAS=vosk ./install.sh

# Vosk plus no online dependencies or lookups.
BOOKPEEK_EXTRAS=vosk ./install.sh --offline

# Whisper and Vosk together; on Apple Silicon, set device = "mps"
# afterward to use Metal through mlx-whisper.
BOOKPEEK_EXTRAS=all ./install.sh

Usage

By default, bookpeek scans 30 seconds first. If that only produces an Audible bumper such as This is Audible, it automatically retries at 60 seconds and then 90 seconds. A normal introduction stops after the first successful scan.

# Scan an audiobook file:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b

# Scan a folder; bookpeek uses the first audio file alphabetically:
bookpeek scan /path/to/audiobook-folder/

# Scan longer with the small CPU-friendly Vosk engine:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b --seconds 42 --engine vosk

# Force Whisper's tiny English model on the CPU:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b --model tiny.en --device cpu

# Search (only) the specific Audible regions, in this order:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b --regions uk,ca,au

# Enable Open Library, Goodreads, and Audnexus enrichment for this scan:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b -w

# Force a completely offline scan, even if config enables enrichment:
bookpeek scan /path/to/book.m4b --offline

# Print the active configuration:
bookpeek config show

# Create a new config file with bookpeek's defaults:
# (Saves to ~/.config/bookpeek/config.toml; use --force to overwrite.)
bookpeek config new

Example response

The JSON result includes the extracted metadata and online provider matches:

{
  "path": "/path/to/The Blighted Stars.m4b",
  "title": "The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds, #1)",
  "author": "Megan E. O'Keefe",
  "narrators": [
    "Ciaran Saward"
  ],
  "extraction": {
    "title": "The Blighted Stars",
    "title_candidates": [
      {
        "text": "The Blighted Stars",
        "source": "id3_title",
        "score": 0.9
      },
      {
        "text": "The Devoured Worlds 01 - The Blighted Stars",
        "source": "folder",
        "score": 0.65
      }
    ],
    "author": "Megan E. O'Keefe",
    "narrators": [
      "Kieran Sord"
    ]
  },
  "online_matches": {
    "audnexus": {
      "authors": [
        {
          "asin": "B00IMSE6VQ",
          "name": "Megan E. O'Keefe",
          "region": "us",
          "score": 1.0
        }
      ],
      "works": [
        {
          "asin": "B0BJ4JLW57",
          "title": "The Blighted Stars",
          "authors": ["Megan E. O'Keefe"],
          "narrators": ["Ciaran Saward"],
          "region": "us",
          "isbn": "9781668615331",
          "score": 0.933,
          "narrator_score": 0.667,
          "match_reason": "title_author"
        }
      ],
      "narrators": ["Ciaran Saward"]
    },
    "goodreads": {
      "authors": [],
      "works": [
        {
          "title": "The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds, #1)",
          "title_complete": "The Blighted Stars (The Devoured Worlds, #1)",
          "author": "Megan E. O'Keefe",
          "score": 0.857
        }
      ]
    },
    "openlibrary": {
      "authors": [],
      "works": [
        {
          "title": "Devoured Worlds Series, 3-book collection ...",
          "author": "Megan E. O'Keefe",
          "score": 0.632
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Configuration is read from ~/.config/bookpeek/config.toml; command-line options override it:

bookpeek config new creates that file with the default settings. It will not overwrite an existing config unless bookpeek config new --force is used.

[asr]
engine = "whisper"
whisper_model = "tiny.en"
vosk_model = "vosk-model-small-en-us-0.15"
device = "auto"
seconds = 30

[extract]
spacy_model = "en_core_web_sm"

[enrich]
enabled = false # set true to always perform web lookup
openlibrary = true
goodreads = true
audnexus = true
# Search order matters: earlier regions win ties and are returned first.
audible_regions = ["us", "uk", "ca", "au"]

Supported Audnexus/Audible regions are us, uk, ca, and au. audible_regions is an ordered priority list, not just a set of enabled regions: if equivalent matches are found in multiple stores, the first region listed wins and its result is returned first. --regions replaces this priority order for one scan, so --regions ca,us gives Canada precedence over the US.

-w / --online may query Open Library, Goodreads, and Audnexus. Goodreads support is installed as a package dependency. Set [enrich].enabled = true to perform that lookup on every scan without passing the flag. Use --offline to override that setting for a single scan. Narrator lookup is performed through Audible catalog search followed by Audnexus metadata lookup when matching is enabled.

CI and PyPI releases

GitHub Actions runs tests, Ruff, and mypy on pushes to main and pull requests. After those checks pass, a change to the package version on main automatically creates the matching GitHub release, which triggers PyPI publishing through Trusted Publishing.

To release a new version:

poetry run python scripts/set_version.py 0.1.1
git add pyproject.toml src/bookpeek/__init__.py
git commit -m "Bump package version"
git push origin main

The repository's PyPI project must have a Trusted Publisher configured for the GitHub repository, workflow .github/workflows/publish.yml, and pypi environment before the first release.

Development

poetry run pytest
poetry run ruff check .
poetry run mypy src/