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I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I’ve been buying audiobooks since 2012 getting almost all of them from either audible.co.uk or audible.com. Currently, my audible library sits at about 2,300 books.

Recently, I’ve noticed that some of my older books don’t show up when I search for them on the audible app on my android phone. I know the books should be there because I use librarything.com to catalogue my books. This means I have a record, independent of the Audible libraries, of which books I have and when I bought them. I also have archived copies of the email confirmations of the orders.

Mostly, I’ve been very happy with Audible (although I still don’t know why they charge their US clients so much more than their UK ones).

Recently though, the android app has started to do strange things. It looks to me like the size of my library slows the app down. Also, although I can’t buy audiobooks from the app, the app seems to have tilted towards selling me my next book rather than helping me find and read the 1,500 audiobooks in my shamefully large TBR pile that I’ve already bought.

It turns out that changes in the Audible app have resulted in some of older books disappearing from people’s library shelves.

The best explanation I’ve seen of this in on the Ilona Andrews Blog

I recommend reading this post:

Ilona Andrews had been contacted by readers to say that copies of their audiobooks had disappeared from their shelves. The authors contacted Amazon’s ACX which controls the pricing and distribution of audiobooks and were told that the reason books go missing is because:

“…the Audible app was changed in a way that the ‘search’ feature only pulls up titles that are actively on sale. Since the previous version had a different ASIN and internal Product ID, the system does not recognize it as being the same book.

Additionally, the Audible search tool (even the one that appears in the library) will not show a book of the same title if its been removed from sale. EVEN IF its already been purchased by the client. This can be especially confusing for customers since many times it is the same audiobook published by a different entity.

If your listeners scroll through their library they will be able to find the title and they can add it to a collection (Audible’s version of a playlist) and they will be able to access it more easily from there.

However we understand that this is not an ideal fix. Therefore we also recommend that any affected listeners contact Audible, confirm this discrepancy is here and Audible customer service should allow them to purchase the ‘new’ version of the title using a complimentary credit.”