Audiobook

How to fine-tune the skip and replay intervals for audiobooks in Books

If you consider yourself a fan of the spoken word and bank on Apple’s own Books service to listen to your favorite books, you might have been frustrated by some of the app’s design choices before. Especially when it comes to manipulating the play time of your audiobook on the fly, be it on your Lock screen, in Control Center or on Apple Watch, the experience can be inconsistent and altogether suboptimal at times.

What all those interfaces have in common however is a nimble skip forward and skip back button, both of which are pegged at a pretty arbitrary plus and minus 15 seconds per touch.

This brief tutorial is going to remind you of a trick to customise those buttons and better fit them to your skipping habits by shortening or prolonging the time jumps. After all, what’s the use of 15 second skip intervals in the middle of a J. R. R. Tolkien marathon?

Apple enables redownloads of audiobooks, iOS 9.3 to add audiobooks to Automatic Downloads

Thanks to the iTunes in the Cloud feature, Apple customers have long been able to re-download apps, movies, TV shows, music, music videos, books, ring tones and tones purchased on the iTunes Store, but not audiobooks. As per Apple’s newly updated support document, customers in 22 countries total can now re-download any audiobook.

This feature is available in iBooks on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with iOS 8.4 or later, or in iTunes on a Mac or Windows PC. In addition, previously downloaded audiobooks, free or paid, are now listed in your Purchased history in iBooks and iTunes.