I have found that there are only two sure ways around the forgetting position issue: write your position down on a piece of paper before shutting off the audio app/phone, or noting where you are when first restarting to play. The first one is pretty obvious, but the second is not. I have noticed that nearly every time (maybe all times) the phone has lost an audio book position over the last 5-6 years or so, the audio player has correctly displayed its position up until I press play. After hitting play, there is about a 5% chance that the location counter will jump to some random spot. By that I mean, let’s say I resume playing my book when I go to lunch. I turn on the phone and enter the Apple audio player (if not already there – it makes no difference) and note the location. I say it aloud to help me remember it such as “3 minutes into track 4 on disk 8.” I then pay close attention when I press play, and look for the location to jump somewhere. If it does, I go back to where I was. This sounds easy, but is not possible to do all of the time.
This has how it has always been. (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1074693 for example) The iPhone’s audio player app has changed over the years (getting worse and worse) with different versions of iOS, but this issue has remained constant. History shows that Apple has never cared enough to fix it. The bug remains even with different 3rd party players (I am not sure about Audible). There may be other issues that we are uncovering with our particular/individual methods, but I swear that if one does everything right, this underlying problem still remains.
I am mostly an Overdrive user and have listened two hours per day 5 days a week over the last 7 years or so. The only things I have learned about Apple’s audio book player are that:
• It has this basic bug mentioned above
• The apple player app gets worse and worse with each iOS version
• Apple does not care enough about us to fix it
• It does no good to give feedback bout this issue – nothing happens
• It does no good when we start “everybody complain” campaigns.
• There have been thousands of hours of people writing about this bug that could probably be fixed in a few tens of hours.
• I have heard dozens of “Fixed it. All you have to do is…” and none have panned out yet. Due to its intermittent nature the bug can disappear for a week and then come back as bad as ever.
I now wait before I upgrade my phone to see if anything has changed for the better – never has. I am currently stuck on iOS 6 as I do not have the patience to scrub-search the entire book every time the audio player looses its position. Someday I will find a user friendly audio book player that will work with Overdrive. I would expect that there should be a Chrome or Windows based product somewhere, but I have not yet seen it.
I hate to sound like an Apple basher because I am not - at least about most things. But this issue really bothers me. Some day Apple will wake up and discover that the way to loose 30,000,000 customers is 1 at a time.
