Setting it up
Bring your own library
Illiterati has no store and no catalogue of its own. It plays what you already have, from four kinds of place. Here is what each one takes.
Plex
Audiobooks in Plex live in a Music library, usually with the Audnexus agent, where a book is an album and each track is a chapter or a part. Illiterati signs in the way Plex's own apps do — a PIN on plex.tv, no password typed into a third-party app — and your token is kept in the iOS Keychain.
Getting to the server is the part that usually goes wrong, so Illiterati is stubborn about it. On every launch and every sync it tries the local address first (the plex.direct name, then the raw http://ip:32400, because plenty of routers refuse to answer DNS queries that resolve to private addresses), then the remote address, then Plex Relay, and it verifies the server's machine identifier before trusting any of them. When you walk out of the house, the network monitor notices, re-reads the server's addresses from plex.tv, and re-resolves the stream at the same position — the book carries on.
Progress is written back to Plex as you listen, so the web player and your other clients agree with the phone. If they ever drift more than two minutes apart, Illiterati shows both and lets you choose.
Files and iCloud folders
Pick a folder in the Files app — on the device, in iCloud Drive, or on any provider that shows up there — and Illiterati keeps a security-scoped bookmark to it. Each sub-folder becomes a book.
M4B files with embedded chapters are used as they are. For a book that is thirty loose MP3s, chapter names are worked out from the filenames: the bitrate tail comes off, so does the prefix or suffix that every file in the book repeats, and so do leading track numbers, and bare numbering becomes “Chapter 4”. Where a source supplies real chapter titles, they are left alone.
SMB shares
Point Illiterati at a share on a NAS — host, share name, username, password — and it streams by byte range straight off it. Nothing has to be installed on the NAS: no Plex, no Jellyfin, no media server at all. The password lives in the Keychain, and durations are probed by reading only the header bytes of each file rather than pulling the whole thing down.
LibriVox
Search LibriVox by title, author, or genre and save a book; it then behaves like anything else in the library, including downloads and position sync. Illiterati plays the per-section MP3s, because the combined .m4b files on archive.org are split into arbitrary halves with no chapter mapping — sections give you real chapters instead.
What it will not play
DRM-protected files. Audible’s .aax and .aaxc downloads, and Apple Books purchases, are encrypted and can only be opened by their own apps — that is a licensing fact, not a missing feature. Illiterati plays unprotected audio: M4B, MP3, M4A, and the rest of what an ordinary file is.
Offline
Any book from any source can be downloaded for offline listening. Downloads run in the background and report progress per book. Whether a file is actually on the phone is worked out by looking for it, never from a stored path, so a reinstall or an iOS container move can’t leave you with a book that claims to be downloaded and isn’t.