I agree, however I think the main cause is studios/publishers just deciding where to allocate the time. Devs are just the ones implementing these shitty decisions.

If you wanna selfhost your own solution, I can recommend Audiobookshelf. It scraps metadata from Apple, Amazon, Google etc, tracks on a per-user basis at what point in the book you are, can be used in a browser and has an android app. It’s easy to set up with Docker too. You can even add PDFs and epubs to the books.

Been using it for a few months and it has been great.

As for sourcing of audiobooks, aside from torrents there are also audiobb.com & audiobooksbee.com . They use RapidGator as host for a ddl.

I found a whole bunch in a place I never thought to look: e-hentai.org Just look for the tag “artbook” and you already find a bunch. Or look for something more specific. Yes, you will have porn in between. Yes, its just the images without text embedded etc. But it’s a decent source.