Listen to Audiobooks
When Apple introduced the Books app in Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, it took over the management of ebooks from iTunes. A standalone Books app on iOS mirrored its features, and now Apple has also added audiobooks to the Books app on both platforms.
The Books app lets you listen to audiobooks, whether you’ve purchased them from the Books Store or from Audible, or ripped your own audiobook CDs. (See How to Rip an Audiobook CD for special information about ripping audiobook CDs.)
Play Audiobooks
Listening to an audiobook is similar to listening to music, with two small differences. The first is that when you listen to an audiobook, you want to pick it up again later where you last paused. The Books app manages this, so if you listen to a chapter on your Mac, you can come back the next day and immediately begin with the next chapter. It stores your precise location, so you can stop and restart your audiobook at any time.
Not only does Books remember where you stopped listening to an audiobook, but it also syncs this location to your iOS device. And when you listen on a portable device, Music finds the last location there and syncs it back as well. So you can listen to an audiobook on an iPhone, then sync and pick up at your last location on your computer. Sync again before you go out, and you can continue on your iPhone.
Another specific feature of audiobooks is that many of them are chaptered, and when you play a chaptered audiobook, a Chapters menu appears at the bottom of the Books app next to the play controls. If you click the Up Next 
icon (see Figure 64), you can view your location in the book, click a chapter to start playing at that location, and see the amount of time remaining in the book.
Since Books stores your location when you stop listening to audiobooks, you may not use the Chapters menu often. It would be practical for, say, a book of essays or short stories, but in my experience, very few audiobooks have named chapters that help you navigate efficiently.
Playback Options
If you click the More 
icon next to the play controls, you’ll see a number of playback options in a contextual menu:
Skip Chapters: Choose Next Chapter to skip ahead to the beginning of the next chapter, or Previous Chapter to go back to the beginning of the current chapter, or to the beginning of the previous chapter, if you’re already at the beginning of a chapter.
Change playback speed: The Playback Speed sub-menu lets you change the speed of your audiobooks. You can choose 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, or 2x, where x is the normal speed at which the book is narrated. In my experience, some audiobooks are narrated too slowly and sound artificial; I often set my playback to 1.25x. But in recent years, audiobook narrators have increased their speed overall, so it’s more common that, with current books, the speed is fine.
Set a sleep timer: The Sleep Timer sub-menu lets you tell Books to stop playing when the current chapter ends, or in a range of durations from 5 minutes to 1 hour.
Add audiobooks to collections: The Add to Collection sub-menu lets you add a book to a collection. Collections are like playlists, but you use them more to organize books than to play them. You create collections by clicking the Plus + icon in the sidebar beneath the Collections header.
Manage an Audiobook Library
As mentioned above, you can use audiobooks that you purchase from Apple’s Books Store or from Audible, or books that you rip from CDs. If you purchase books from Apple, they’re automatically added to your library. If you purchase and download books from Audible, or rip your own, click Audiobooks in the sidebar of the Books app, then click the Library tab, then drag the files to the right-hand section of the window.
If you have a lot of audiobooks, you may run into problems, because the Books app stores these files in a somewhat hidden location within your user folder. If you have a large audiobook library, you may want to store the books on an external drive (see Where Are All Those Files?). Unlike with the Music and TV apps, you cannot choose a different location to store your books, so the only way to do this is to manually move them to a different location.
To do this, select an audiobook and drag it to your desktop, or to a folder in the Finder. This makes a copy of the book. Move it where you want to store it, then delete the book in the Books app: select a book, press Delete, and confirm that you want to delete the book.
If you later want to listen to a book that’s not in the library, just add it as described above. And remember that you can re-download your purchases from the Books store (click the Audiobook Store tab, then click Purchased below Quick Links), and Audible lets you redownload purchases from their website.