How to move audibooks in Books.app > Audiobooks to new mac running Big Sur?

[madsylar]

I have about 50 Audiobooks in my Books.app > Audiobooks section. They were not bought through the app store; they were mp3 files that I imported manually perhaps 2-3 years ago. I installed Big Sur in a new machine, and all the PDF books on Books.app > Books were migrated, but not the Audiobooks.

Does anyone know how?

There isn't any option to export audiobooks. Thanks for your help.

 

[drdeprez]

Hi Madsylar,

I've just had the same problem you've described after doing a clean installation of Big Sur, whereby none of my audiobooks appeared in Books.app when I first launched it (and after signing into my iCloud account). I was also missing several books too that I can manually added to my Books.app library previously.

Here is what I did to get everything back the way it was previously:
Copied all of the below folders from a backup of Macintosh HD\Users\<my user folder>\Library\Containers to the corresponding location on my Mac:

Launched Books.app and found that everything was back to normal.

Note - the first folder shown above is the one that contains your audiobook files - within its Data/Documents/iBooks/Books/AudioBooks subfolder. However, I found that copying only that folder to the new Mac did not help with 'restoring' my audiobooks into Books.app. Copying ALL above folders is what did the trick.

Some/all of the above folders will probably be present on your new Mac already. I would recommend first ensuring Books.app is closed and then moving those existing folders to another location - so you have a copy of them in case something goes wrong. Then copy the same folders from your backup or old Mac.

Hope this helps you or others.