Fixing iBooks Not Syncing PDF Files And ePub Books On Mac, iPad And iPhone

Thank you.

Thank you. Apple really screwed up iTunes and pdf/book syncing. You saved the day for me.

Thank you for all that. The problem I have with iBooks is that regularly on the iPad some ePubs disappear — and only one section of the ePubs. I have to download again. It doesn’t occur with iBooks on my MBP.

I am very sad that it is so complicated to take my PDF with me. I need all our legal texts with me and it would be so easy when iBooks could synchronize between my iPhone, my iPad, my office computer and my home computer. I need to consult my collection also offline. The sync by iTunes is no solution, iCloud would just be fine. Please!

When I select Devices in Itunes, it’s not even showing Sync lit up as an option – and I have 4 devices listed in my account. I have no idea how to get anything moved, much less the pdf files. Apple is so complicated it’s unbelievable.

My problem is that iTunes constantly “forgets” my settings on iOS 8 and reverts from “All Books” to “Selected Books” on both my iPhone and iPad. I don’t know why, or how to fix it. Other than that, I seem to be able to sync non-iPurchased ePubs and pdfs pretty well on iTunes 12.1.2.27 (Yosemite), although often my notes and highlights in ePubs fail to sync.

Thx a lot!

I have been trying to sync books not purchased from apple book stores for the whole day and you just provide the solution!

Meanwhile, may I know if there are any ways to sync pdf docs other than using ibooks?
Cuz I am trying to highlight and sync pdf docs , but I can’t do that in ibooks cuz ibooks do not allow highlighting function of pdf docs

I would also appreciate it if you could let the readers know if there are any alternative ways to sync, as, like you mentioned, using iTunes and i books to sync every time, is not fun at all.

Thx a lot

Jim

Hello! All of my Epub and pdf’s show up in iBooks, but when I go to transfer them to iTunes like it is shown, they don’t transfer over. Any suggestions? We just installed el capitan for our mac and I have about 40 epub books I’ve gotten from various locations other than the iBooks store

Show all purchases isn’t showing up in the iBook settings. iPhone 5c IOS 9.1?

I can only wish the actual staff at the Apple store knew this and that I had thought to check Google before I lost everything in iBooks. I had to return a work iPad at the end of June and to ensure I would not lose everything I did an iTunes back up and iCloud backup as well as to an external drive. It was several days later, after I had reformatted the work iPad and returned it, that I discovered that dozens of e-pub books I had bought and multiple PDFs, many of them my original workbooks for seminars, that I had saved in iBooks were gone forever. I was quite clear when I asked for everything to be copied over in the store that I was anxious about the amount of original material that I stood to lose and was assured that the Restore from the Cloud would bring everything across. It took two trips back to the store where two different staff members said ‘I’ve never seen that happen before!” and they called a tech genius in to tell me what you have explained in this post.

Even more infuriating to me was that every single thing in Adobe Reader, Kindle, Bluefire reader and Kobo copied over beautifully, but the one, specific e-reading app designed for the actual brand and device does not. It is beyond stupid and has left me with a high level of distrust towards anything Apple. All I heard from others was how simple, co-ordinated, clever and wonderfully designed Apple products were compared to the opposition and I fell for it. What it means to me now is a high level of anxiety when I do any kind of upgrade and and an Android phone that I will never change for an iPhone.

Thanks for making me feel better that I am not alone in not knowing this could happen.

Cheers,

Robyn

This isn’t working for me i’m afraid.

I have almost 2,000 books in my e-library and everything was working fine until I was forced by El Capitan to use iBooks (previously was deleting the app from the computer and was able to manage through iTunes.

So after my books were transferred to iBooks and I synced my iPad (not realising that everything that synced before would not sync anymore), only 282 books were copied to my iPad – all the others were available through iBooks for Mac, but not on the iPad.

No matter how many times I “Copy books to iBooks” there are 282 left in iTunes.

I have worked out that I can see almost all (for some reason not all) books on my device after ensuring iBooks was selected in my iCloud settings on both computer and iPad. But now even though I can see almost all books, when I try to open non-purchased books on my iPad I get a message saying “not enough memory to download” even though I can see in my iCloud settings that there is 1.4GB of files in the drive, there is over 2GB free on the drive, and over 30GB available on my iPad!

This is quite seriously doing my head in. Before El Capitan, I could happily sync all 1,800 books through iTunes, see them all in the library and open and read them all – now I cannot do that.

I should also say that of the 282 books that sync, 89 of them require “updating” that iBooks for Mac cannot manage to update, and when trying to update on my iPad it quite often freezes and I have to re-start – and these are purchased books!

I would love some further advice if you have any to add – at this point I am about ready to start throwing things…and all I want to do is read a freaking book!!! (frustration overload).

I have an iPad 2 that was becoming slow – advice I received was to perform a full backup, reset and restore. I did it to my windows computer – not iCloud as I am suspicious of anything “cloud” that I have no material control over. After performing a factory reset of my iPad and an iTunes Restore all my work related pdf technical documents that were in iBooks have now been lost which have taken me years to collect. What is generally understood in computer terminology with a “backup” action obviously has a different meaning to Apple as it appears to be Apple selective. I also cannot find any advice from iPad Gurus that appear to work for me finding my lost documents on my backup files on my computer.

I am completely done with Apple products forever and I have now started migrating to newly purchased Android devices where I can take personal responsibility for my data. Loosing all my professional technical documents obviously is of no concern to big companies like Apple and as such I have already swayed a number of persons to go down the Android route as I believe Apple has obviously adopted a stupid dictator attitude with a zero care philosophy. Well done Apple!

Great post, but you’ve left out one thing (unless I missed it). On the Mac, in System Preferences, iCloud you have to 1) turn ON iCloud drive (click the check box), then 2) select the iCloud Drive OPTIONS button, and then 3) turn ON iBooks.app by clicking the check-box next to it. My situation was that ALL my iBook app settings on iPad, iPhone and Mac were set correctly, with syncing ON and sharing the same apple ID, the iPad and iPhone syncing perfectly but there was NO CONTENT on the Mac (interestingly though, there were all the FOLDERS that I’d created on iPhone and iPad — just no content in ANY of the folders). Changing the System Preferences for iCloud Drive as described above fixed my problem.

I have been trying all day to get books into Mac iBooks. These are not books purchased from Apple, but my own collection (currently stored in e-pub format in Finder and accessed via Calibre). Despite following all advice here, I can’t get any books from Finder into Mac iBooks. I tried Finder/ Choose book / Open with iBooks and it opens and I can read it but when I close, iBooks hasn’t stored it and the only way to get it back is to go via Finder/Open With – again. Would love to be able to make a list or a collection or anything at all in Mac iBooks but it isn’t happening. I also have a few books in my iPad iBooks that I have managed to transfer as far as iTunes on my Mac but no further and they won’t sync with Mac iBooks either. BTW I’m running Mac Sierra 10.13.6. Any clues anyone?