How To Manage an Audiobook Collection In macOS Catalina

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about using the Books app for audiobooks in macOS Catalina.

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So a lot of people are not happy with how the Books app handles audiobooks in macOS Catalina. Before Catalina some people had tons of audiobooks stored in iTunes. The books were on an external drive but they saw them all in the their library in iTunes and they could use their library to sync those audiobooks with their iOS devices or just listen to their audiobooks on their Mac. But once they upgraded to Catalina the iTunes app was gone and instead the Books app took over the audiobooks. It handles them in a very different way.

So as an example here I just have a small number of audiobooks in the new Books app in Catalina. The problem is some people have many more like hundreds of audiobooks. I actually have hundreds of audiobooks as well but I don't handle them in this way. I'll show you what I do with my audiobooks a little later on. So the deal is in iTunes before Catalina you could set it up so that you used an external drive to store your media. So all of your audiobooks would be on an external drive and didn't fill up your internal drive. You can still do that in the Music app and the TV app to store your music and videos on an external drive.

But unfortunately in Books under Preferences that is missing. You can't choose to store your audiobooks on an external drive. They are all in the internal drive. What's worse is that if you previously had your audiobooks in iTunes stored externally and you upgraded to Catalina it moved them all to the internal drive. Which is no big deal if you had four books or even twenty books. But if you had hundreds it quickly filled up your internal drive. So where are these files exactly. Unfortunately if you Control click on them or look through the menus there is no way to locate where each one is.

You could find them if you know where to look. So in the Finder go to the Go menu and hold down the Option key and you'll see Library up here. Go to Library and under Library you could look for Containers. Then in Containers look for com.Apple.BKAgentService. In there you're going to find a whole bunch of folders. If you look in Data, then Documents, iBooks, Books, you'll find a folder called Audiobooks. The Audiobooks folder is where it stores your audiobooks. So here you can see the four books that I had there. Two of them are books that I purchased from Apple. So these appear in folders with their Apple ID number which means nothing. They have file names like Track 1.m4b. But if you actually look at the file, I'm going to hold the spacebar down for QuickLook, you could see the icon actually matches the book. So it's pretty easy to figure out which book is which.

Then I have two other folders here. One of these is a book that I downloaded from Audible. So using an Audible subscription I went, using Safari, and said download this book and I got an aax file and I was able to drag and drop that into the Books app. You can see it stores it aax file, right there, just as is. This other folder has a ton of files in it because I has a bunch of MP3's. This could represent a book that was downloaded from another site. I downloaded this from Archive.org. But it could also be something where you ripped it from a CD and it ended up with a MP3 file for each track.

So that's where these files end up. So if you want to get these out of your internal drive you can go into here and grab each one of these and drag it to your external drive to get them out. Remember you can drag and drop to an external drive and it will create a copy. But if you Command drag will move the file. So it will make a copy on the external drive and remove it from the internal drive at the same time. So you can clean this up by pulling all of this stuff out of there.

Now the question is what do you do with it. So you want to manage and organize your audiobooks. Right. You've used iTunes to do that before and it would be great to use the Books app to do it now. Except that it's just not working out. You can't fit all that stuff on your internal drive. Well, thankfully the Finder is fantastic at allowing you to manage and organize files. So I've created an Audiobooks folder here on an external drive to hold all my audiobooks. Now imagine if there were hundreds here instead of just these few. 

There are a lot of different things I can do here. I can name the files anything I want. So I can change the name to be the book title, the author's name and the book title. I can use spaces or not use spaces. Here I am using the default name that came with these Audible files when I downloaded them. Which are good enough for me to figure out what book is what. Then I have this folder here that has all those MP3's in it for that book. Then I have some other things. Like here are the m4b files that I got from Apple's Bookstore and I moved them over here. I could just leave them like this if I want.

But I can create subfolders as well. So you can create a new folder here and you can give it an author's name for instance and drag and drop the book in there. It's pretty easy then to use the Finder in any mode you want. List View is pretty good for this. You can create folders within folders. So for instance I can create a genre folder, like mystery or sci-fi, and under that I can create authors. I can do a biographies folder but instead of doing an author's name or even using the titles of the books, I can use the subject name which is how you would find biographies in a bookstore or library. So you can organize these anyway you want.

I can make it even easier to find these books by adding my own metadata. Now some books will already have it like this book, since it's from the Apple Store if I do Command i you're going to see I get all sorts of information here about the book. If I look at other books I'm not going to get that kind of information. But I can certainly add it. I can add Tags, for instance. I could add Comments too and these will show up in searches. So if I wanted to add, like, author's name in Comments or alternative titles or something I'd want to search on I can certainly do that here to make it easier to organize things.

Now to listen to these books most of the time you're going to have to drag them into the Books app although Apple's own books you can actually open those up in QuickTime Player and they'll play. But Audible books, for instance, you're going to need the authorization that's part of the Books app and some of these other ones it's probably better, like for a large collection here, to listen to it in the Books app.

So the idea would be is when you want to listen to a book you drag and drop it into the Books app. It will import it in and put it in your internal drive's library. Which isn't where you want it for the longterm but it's fine for listening to the book now. Then select that book when you're done and simply hit the Delete key and delete it from your internal library. You can see that book is still there in my external drive. That didn't change. So I'm only going to put the book I'm listening to, or maybe a few books, here in the Books app. It's probably not the ideal way to do it. I'm sure you want to have all your books in here. But it is a viable alternative for a lot of people now.

Now I mentioned that I have hundreds of books as well. But I handle it in a very different way. As a matter of fact I didn't even notice this problem until other people started telling me about it. That's because I've been buying books from Audible for a longtime and I just the Audible app on my iPhone to listen to books. So I never stored them in iTunes. I never even downloaded the books. I just went into the App, looked at my library, downloaded the book I was going to listen to right then. I listened to it and then removed it from my iOS app when I was done.

Now I know some people like to download copies of everything they've purchased. Music, movies, and audiobooks. If you do that then having them on an external drive and doing what I showed is a good way to do that with Catalina. But I'm finding out that a lot of people that use Audible didn't know about the Audible app or didn't think of it as the best way to listen to audiobooks. For me my iPhone is what I have with me when I want to read, whether I'm walking, driving, relaxing, or going to bed I have my phone with me and that's the device I use to listen to audiobooks, not my Mac. You can do the same thing with Apple's audiobooks. Just use the Books app on your iPhone rather than the one on your Mac and only get the book that you're currently listening to.

Now hopefully at some point Apple will add the ability in the Books app to store your audiobooks media anywhere you want just like in the Music and TV apps. But until they do you're going to have to use alternatives like this to manage your audiobook collection.