Just click the 'download' button below this news item, and you will be able to read a really useful PDF about how to download Big Finish audio productions in your account directly onto your iphone or ipad.

For ease of use, iphones and ipads are designed so that you can download audio files using the universally recognised itunes program. The only problem with that is that if you're trying to download audio onto your ipad or iphone, and that audio is not available on itunes, your ipad and iphone doesn't support the correct software.

It's easy to download from the Big Finish website to a PC or Mac computer, as many of you will know. You buy the production, click the download button and your computer automatically downloads the zip file and unzips it. But, as many of our customers have pointed out, this doesn't happen when you're using an iphone or ipad.

We are currently developing a way for items purchased from our website on these devices to be streamed or played while you're still online (you can, of course, download them at any time if you access your account via a computer and not a tablet or phone). But if you actually want to purchase them on your iphone or ipad and download them into iTunes, then the attached PDF explains exactly how to do that. You use a free app called Download Lite. The PDF gives full instructions. Skip to the bottom of this item and download it now.

If you're wondering why Big Finish doesn't make all its productions available through iTunes, here's the reason... itunes quite legitimately charges any supplier (such as Big Finish) who seeks to supply content through iTunes. They are, essentially a distributor, a gateway through which people can buy great audio and video content. Our only problem is that our productions are entirely paid for by the money our customers pay us. This means, if we can't make a certain amount of money back, then we can't afford to make the productions in the first place.

For other suppliers of audio to iTunes, who are often releasing archive material or material paid for by other budgets (for example radio or tv budgets), the amount it costs to distribute through iTunes makes perfect sense. And the discounts, set by audible.com/.co.uk (who supply audiobook content to itunes) encourage greater sales for very low prices.

But Big Finish has a fairly niche market, and if itunes started selling all our material for, say, £1.99 per double-CD full-cast audiobook, only the most loyal, dedicated of customers would continue buying direct from our website for £12.99. And it's not too difficult to work out how many, many more sales we'd have to make through itunes to get anywhere near the amount of income we get from direct sales from our website (something like an 800% increase in sales). It's our judgement that it would be impossible to bring in enough funds for us to keep making our productions if we sold our audiobooks this way.

So, that's why we're not available through iTunes and audible.com/.co.uk. You can, though, find some of our older productions on iTunes as Spoken Word Albums, although finding them (as we've sadly discovered) is not exactly easy.

But never mind, a solution is at hand. And if you want to know exactly how to implement it, please do click the download button below and read the really helpful PDF, supplied by our website partners, Hughes Media.