Play the Audiobooks You Own on iPhone and iPad

Apple Books on the iPhone gives you no way to import an M4B file on the device itself. You can open the file in Files, where it plays as loose audio, but nothing files it in a library, remembers your place or shows you chapters. iCloud syncs the audiobooks bought from Apple rather than the ones you imported yourself, so a book you added on a Mac does not simply appear on the phone. And a folder of MP3 chapters is not treated as a book at all, because MP3 has no place inside the file to declare itself an audiobook, so the tracks are filed as music, one item per chapter.

justRead takes the computer out of that story. Point it at a folder the Files app can see and the audiobooks in it are imported on the device: a single m4b becomes one book, and a folder of chapter files becomes one book too, with one cover, one position and one chapter list. Title, author and cover art are read out of the files themselves.

It is not a store and it is not an Audible client. It plays the DRM free files you already have, in the same library as the EPUBs, PDFs and comics you already read, and the time you spend listening counts toward the same reading streak.

An M4B is an MPEG-4 container, the same family as an M4A or an MP4, holding the same AAC audio. What makes it an audiobook rather than a song is metadata written inside the file: the container declares an audiobook media type, and the chapter marks live in the file as a chapter track. That is why an M4B can show a real chapter list, and why a plain MP3 usually cannot.

justRead reads that chapter information out of the file and shows it as a list you can jump around in, with your current position marked. Title, author and cover art are taken from the same file in the same pass, so a properly tagged M4B lands in the library complete, with nothing to type in afterwards.

Nothing needs converting first. Put the m4b in a folder the Files app can see and import it. If your collection is a mix of single m4b files and folders of MP3 chapters, both shapes work, and each one ends up as a single book rather than a pile of tracks.

M4B is in the title of this page because it is what people search for, but the player is not limited to it. mp3, m4a, aac and flac all play, and so do .audiobook and .zab packages. A .zab is simply a ZIP archive holding the audio files of a book, a format almost nothing on the iPhone bothers to open, and justRead plays both package types like any other audiobook.

This is the most common audiobook complaint on the iPhone, and it is almost never the player's fault. There are three usual causes and they are easy to tell apart once you know what to look for.

The first is that the file is not really an M4B. Renaming an .m4a to .m4b changes the name and nothing else, and the bytes that declare the media type and hold the chapter track are not written by renaming a file. The audio then plays perfectly while the chapter list stays empty, because there was never a chapter track to read. You will find claims online that the two formats are identical apart from the extension. They are the same container family, which is why the audio plays, but a renamed file with no chapter data has no chapters to show in any player, on any device.

The second is that the chapters were written in a form the player is not reading. Chapter marks in an MPEG-4 file can be stored as a QuickTime chapter track or as Nero style chapter atoms, and encoders write one, the other, or both. A file that shows a chapter list in one app and one long track in another is usually this. So is the case people report where the same book, after the same sync, shows chapters on one device and none on the next.

The third is that it is an MP3, or a folder of them. MP3 has no container slot that declares a file to be a book, and although ID3 chapter frames do exist, most players ignore them. That is why a folder of chapter files is the more reliable shape for an MP3 audiobook, and why justRead builds the chapter list from the files in the folder rather than from tags nobody honours. If you want to check a file before blaming any app, open it in a tool that can show its container brand and its chapter list. A file named .m4b whose container brand reads as an audio file is the renamed case, and rebuilding it is the only real fix.

A twenty eight track MP3 audiobook is not twenty eight books, and it should not arrive in your library as twenty eight items. In justRead a folder of chapter files is imported as a single audiobook: one cover, one position, one entry in the library, and a chapter list built from the tracks it contains.

Two practical notes make this go smoothly. Keep each book's tracks together in their own folder, one folder per book. And if the track numbers are part of the file names, keep them zero padded, so that 02 sorts before 10; badly numbered tracks are the usual reason an audiobook plays out of order, in any app on any platform.

Nesting is fine. Point the app at a folder of audiobook folders, sorted by author or by series if that is how you keep them, and every book inside is imported however deep it sits. Pull to refresh rescans and picks up whatever you added since. Delete a book inside the app and a later rescan will not drag it back in.

There is no CarPlay. What exists is Car Mode, a screen inside the app with oversized controls you can hit without looking, plus Lock Screen and Control Center controls while a book plays. Those are genuinely useful and they are not the same thing as an app on your car's built in display. If CarPlay is the reason you are shopping, buy something else, and please do it before the trial rather than after.

There is no Audible support. AA and AAX files are DRM protected and stay inside Audible, and there is no way to import an Audible library. There is no streaming from a server either, so an Audiobookshelf or Plex collection needs a client built for that server. There is no store, no catalogue and nothing to purchase inside the app, and audiobooks are the one thing an OPDS catalogue will not hand you here.

On an audiobook there are no highlights or notes, and no metadata editing after import, so the title, author and cover art you get are the ones inside the files. And this is an iPhone and iPad app: there is no Mac, Android, Windows or web version.