Life was so much easier when music, podcasts and audiobooks all lived happily together

Life was so much easier when music, podcasts and audiobooks all lived happily together. I just don’t understand why Apple insists on now having a separate app for each – I can’t be the only person who listens to a podcast and then wants to continue with the audiobook I am listening to? I used to change the media kind of podcasts to audiobooks, stick everything in a playlist and all worked fine. Now there are no playlists in ibooks so that doesn’t work.

My main reason for posting though is ibooks not remembering where I am in a book if I listen to another book in the meantime and then try to go back to the first book it restarts again at the beginning. This was always a bug when listening to audiobooks in music and seems to have been carried over to ibooks.

The Audible app used to be reasonable but it just crashes on me all the time now and is unusable.

Ecoute used to work well too, remembering your place even if you jumped about between audiobooks but since the latest music update it is doing the same as the ibooks app and going back to the beginning of books.

I listen to audiobooks sometimes for 4 hours a day and ibooks not saving my place is driving me demented – does anyone have a solution?