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i can't transfer audiobooks to my iphone

i have dozens of audiobooks and have been manually managing them for years. after the last update i am now unable to transfer any audiobooks to my phone. when i drag them to the phone in the sidebar they show up as screened text on the books tab. ocasionally i can get one part of a book to transfer, but never an entire book. i am having the same problem with all audiobooks, old and new. i would love a solution, but would settle for a work-around at this point. i have the current version of itunes and ios. i have 7GB free on the phone. please help, i'm losing my mind trying to fix this.

iPhone 5

Posted on Oct 29, 2013 6:31 AM

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Posted on Oct 29, 2013 6:36 AM

In iTunes select your device. Go to the Books tab, scroll down and select Sync Audiobooks. You can either sync them all, or sync selected books. Hit Apply.

20 replies

Oct 29, 2013 7:14 AM in response to fat-kid

You might try a reset of your phone, and a reboot of your computer. If you are running the latest version of iTunes, it should work as I described.


Since the upgrade to iOS 7 you are no longer able to sync audiobooks as playlists as far as I've been able to tell. You sync them as i described, then look in the audiobooks section of Music under the "more" tab at the bottom.

Oct 29, 2013 8:32 AM in response to hot_spur

i am on ios 7.0.3. i have tried turning the phone off and on, rebooting, restoring from a backup, syncing, and manually dragging individual books. trying to sync again and itunes is stuck on step 7 of 7 waiting for items to copy. it has been stuck here for half an hour. the books tab shows the selected books in screened text and the phone doesnt show them at all under audiobooks.

Oct 29, 2013 9:31 AM in response to hot_spur

i tried syncing a book i have had forever and always kept on my phone. it has been hung up on step 6 of 6 waiting for changes to be applied for half an hour. i have tried things like this in the past and hove found that a few of my books will transfer parts to the phone and some will not transfer at all. all of my books were purchased from the itunes store and most were purchased on the computer rather than on the phone.


any other suggestions?

Oct 29, 2013 11:56 AM in response to fat-kid

I don't know why it would hang up on apps. I restored my phone yesterday, and all of my apps reinstalled just fine. It took about a half hour because there were 84 of them, but you can follow the progress in the top bar to see where things are in the process.


At some point it may be less time consuming to just restore as new, but be prepared to have to resync everything and redo all of your settings.

Oct 29, 2013 12:27 PM in response to hot_spur

the stalling aside. i have checked the manually manage music box and when i try to drag an audiobook to the phone i get "could not copy ___ because an unknown error occured -69"


this got me curious so i tried to drag a single song to the phone and it acts just like the audiobooks. it shows up on the phone as screened text but wont actually copy it over to the phone.

i can't transfer audiobooks to my iphone

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