Apple books

[pwalker8]

On iOS, Apple has had audiobooks in the Books app for a few releases, with Catalina, they finally put audiobooks in the Books app on the Mac. Syncing audiobooks between the Mac and your iDevice is done via Finder. After playing around with things for a while, here is a few comments.

First, on the Mac.

First, while you can still order audiobooks manually on iDevices, this feature isn't available on the Mac. A major issue when dealing with series. The other major issue is that you can't edit meta data for audiobooks. Not only is this metadata embedded in the audiobook (which I can actually understand) but also metadata in the Books app, such as Date added and Date last read. This is an issue since Date added is the date you added or imported it into the books apps, which means that 99% of my audiobooks now have the same date added. I suspect that someone will eventually figure out what file has all this information.

Second, syncing with your iDevice. You have to manually go through and check each audiobook you want to sync. No syncing by collection, or by author. This is a big issue for me.

Last, when it won't transfile an audiobook because it doesn't think you are authorized, it won't tell you which book it didn't transfer. Thus, you are left trying to figure out which one has an issue.

On the iDevice
I really don't have any major issues with how audiobooks are handled on the iDevices. It would be nice if Apple would load audible audiobooks in the cloud so I can see and download them on my iDevice, but I understand there are legal issues involved.