this is the biggest problem i have with audiobooks/podcasts. I've thought about the idea of hacking a fitbit or apple watch that can track sleep to automatically pause them but I fall asleep much faster and easier than my fiancee and she likes to leave things going to cover my snoring.
I use Listen audiobook player with a fifteen minute sleep timer. Before the sleep timer stops it playing it plays a series of soft beeps, if the phone detects any movement it will resume for another fifteen minutes.
Yes, there's still a little rewinding to do to work out where you left off but it only takes a few seconds.
Two fit bits, with a recorded stop time for each of you (offset a little bit so that the part immediately before you went to sleep is repeated). When you wake up, the segment in between the two stop times has already been extracted and sent to whoever fell asleep first so that they can catch up before jointly continuing the podcast with their partner before bed.
I just sort of estimate which means in practice I sometimes listen to parts of it I wasn’t paying attention to over again. Most of the podcasts I listen to are like 20 minutes long and it takes me like 5 minutes to fall asleep.
I just set a sleep timer to 60 minutes and rewind the next day until I encounter a part of the book that I remember. Slightly annoying, but not a big deal at all.
