30 April 2026 · Book Assembly Team · 4 min read
Book tracking apps have a problem with audiobooks. Most of them were built for physical books, and audiobooks got bolted on as an afterthought. You end up with an audiobook that says "Pages: 0" or, worse, shows the page count from the print edition - which tells you nothing useful about a twelve-hour listen.
We've rebuilt audiobook support from scratch. It's not a workaround anymore.
When you set a book's format to Audiobook, the page count input disappears. In its place: hours and minutes.
Add your audiobook, enter "12h 30m" as the length, and that's what you see on the book detail page. Not "Pages: 0". Not "Pages: 480" borrowed from the hardcover. The actual runtime.
This works everywhere. The Add Book form, the Edit form, the book detail page. Set the format to Audiobook and the UI adapts.
This is the part that matters for daily use.
Open the progress modal on an audiobook and you'll see Hours and Minutes inputs instead of a page number. Log that you're 4 hours 23 minutes in, and the book detail page shows "4h 23m of 12h 30m (35%)". Your reading log shows the same - "4h 23m of 12h 30m" when you updated, or "at 4h 23m" if you paused there.
The progress bar works too. Tap anywhere on the bar to jump to roughly that position, same as with page-based books. Marking an audiobook finished snaps your position to the full length automatically.
Page-based books are completely unchanged. Same modal, same "Page 142 of 380" everywhere. The format drives which UI you see.
When you scan an audiobook's barcode or search by ISBN, the format often comes back from the database as "Audio CD" or "Audible Audio Edition" or "MP3 CD". We now map those to our canonical Audiobook format automatically.
That means the Length input appears immediately - you don't have to manually change the format first and wonder why there's a page count field on your audiobook.
Same treatment for ebooks: "Kindle Edition", "EPUB", "Online Resource" all map to Ebook.
Here's something that caught us out during testing.
Goodreads doesn't track audiobook duration. When you export your library and import it here, audiobook rows came through with the format correctly set to Audiobook - but they also carried a page count from the print edition. An audiobook would show "480 pages" because that's how long the paperback is.
Now we strip the page count on audiobook imports. The format is preserved, but the misleading page number is dropped. You can fill in the actual runtime manually after import, or leave it blank if you don't care.
If you're using the new multi-entry notes feature, audiobook notes can now anchor to a time position instead of a page or chapter.
Add a note, choose "Time (h/m)" as the progress anchor, enter 4h 23m, and the note card shows a clock badge with that position. Useful for marking a specific moment in the narration - a favourite passage, a plot twist, a section you want to return to.
Page-based books still show Page, Chapter, and Percent anchors. Time only appears when the book is an audiobook.
The library health check used to flag audiobooks as "missing page count". Now it checks for either: if a book has pages or a duration, it passes. Audiobooks with a length set are no longer treated as incomplete.
The backup format is now v8. Exports include your audiobook lengths and time-based progress - both the current position and the full history of progress entries. CSV exports get two new columns at the end: "totalDuration" and "currentDuration", showing human-readable times like "12h 30m" for audiobooks (blank for page-based books).
Older backups (v4 through v7) still import cleanly. The new fields just won't be present.
Stats are still page-based. "Pages read this week" doesn't yet have an audiobook equivalent like "Listening time this week". That's coming, but we wanted to ship the core tracking first and see how it feels in practice before deciding exactly what stats make sense.
If you switch a book's format after logging progress (say, from Paperback to Audiobook), the existing progress entries stay as pages. We don't try to convert them. The new format takes over for future updates.
Audiobooks aren't second-class citizens anymore. They have their own length field, their own progress tracking, their own UI throughout. If you listen to audiobooks, this should feel like the app finally understands what you're doing.
