Q: I am totally confused by audio books in iBooks
OK, I don't use audiobooks much but today I bought one for the first time via iBooks and I am totally confused by how this works. I bought it on my iPad, assuming I'd be able to download it to my iPhone to listen to in the car. Later I opened iBooks on my phone and it wasn't there; I looked in the store but it didn't show as purchased, just as something I could buy again. Weird. So then I went to my Mac, and it also is not in iBooks there. In fact, you can't buy iBooks in the iBooks store from the Mac, from what I can see, though you can go to the iBooks store in iTunes and find them. And there's a "my audiobooks" area in iTunes, but it's not there.
Reading some support articles it sounds like you cannot re-download audiobooks and there's no cloud backup? I assumed they'd work like everything else Apple sells (music, books, applications, etc.) and once you buy it, you've bought it. Is that right? If that's not the case I would have appreciated a warning that it wasn't going to work like every other thing piece of digital content they sell.
So before I go ask for my money back, I thought I'd ask here & see if I'm just missing something.
Thanks for nay help
MacBook Air, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1)
Posted on Oct 24, 2015 2:42 PM
Audiobooks are a one-time only download, they will not show in the cloud. If you connect the iPad to your Mac and do File > Devices > Transfer Purchases in your Mac's iTunes then it should copy over to the Audiobooks section of your library - you can then play it on your Mac and/or sync it to your phone (and add it to your backup of your downloads/library ; other items are only potentially redownloadable whilst they remain in the store and you don't move countries).
Posted on Oct 26, 2015 3:35 AM