Disappointment with iBooks 1.1 PDF support

Ok, I've imported my 168 some PDFs to Itunes 9.2 via the add files menu to the Books category in iTunes.

I can see them in the Books Catagory, sizes range from 2 megs up to 120 megs.

Orginally by default iTunes is set to auto sync all books.

I updated iBooks 1.0 to 1.1 via 3G

I pulled in the iPad to my Mac which has my iTunes 9.2 initially after what looked like iTunes syncing and sending the PDFs over to my iPad (took forever as it's about 6 gigs of PDFs)

After sync was complete i opened iBooks and not only could I not find my PDFs but I couldn't find the PDF button.

So I called apple and talked to a tech who wasn't even sure how to import the PDFs to The iPad guess he though it works like other PDF readers via wifi or the app screen of the device in iTunes. So I told him what I did to get the PDFs into iTunes and he lead me to the books tab of my device in iTunes. It was set to sync all books. So we tried to sync just two of them.

iTunes starts the sync, it looks like it has removed the PDFs from the IPAD and then sends up the two I selected.

I start up iBooks 1.1 after the sync was complete and now I have a Books/PDF button. So I click PDF and it shows the two books i sent up.

Thinking that was what it was i let the rep go as it takes forever to sync up 6.8 gigs of PDFs. So I selected each PDF and hit the sync again.

After sync is complete I open up Ibooks 1.1 AND ALL THE PDFS ARE GONE AGAIN!

Very frustrating.

So i simply got annoyed and used PDF HD again to use my PDFs.

So much for having all my readable stuff in one location.

Download this iPad PDF manual and try that:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/enUS/iPad_UserGuide.pdf

*To all of you who have issues syncing large amount of PDFs to iBooks, I have found the problem and a solution to it.*

If you ever added a lot of music to your iDevice in one shot, you probably noticed how the iPod app display a message similar to "Library update in progress". This is because once the files are on your device, they need to be processed by the app. It is the same thing for books. The only difference is that there is no user feedback. Nothing. Nada. Which is a fail from Apple's part.

The solution is simple, try to leave iBooks running on your device for a couple of minutes. It takes about 1 second per book to process them. Once it is done, you will see the PDFs selector appear at the top of the app and don't close the app until it is done processing.

I hope this helps. Apple really need to add a loading icon or something in there to make it more obvious.

Well, I had a good one today. I sycned a ton of PDFs last night. This morning, I did the "Open with" routine in Good Reader... and it wiped out all the synced PDFs.

unable to do highlighting - this is a feature for "books" only.

Looks like iannotate will be staying on my iPad for a bit longer

Yup that was it, it took all night for iBooks to propagate them into the reader, but no TOC. So guess I'll be using HD PDF more till they add that feature. Plus it's slow as ****.

I have the new iBooks , everything is there except the PDF tab.
Can anyone explain this?

There needs to be a PDF in the iBooks app for the PDF tab to to show up.

Same problem here. I had a couple dozen PDFs in iBook 1.1. I added one more big one, and all but the last one disappeared! Completely gone! Very frustrating.

I haven't had any problems with iBooks, I am actually transferring many PDFs into it, including some 300MB+ ones. It opens all of them without any problems. The issue many are having with PDFs not displaying in the PDF section could be solved with a double iTunes synchronization. Sometimes I synchronize but they don't appear immediately, then i just press the Sync button again and it works.

But, iBooks is indeed a very weak PDF reader, iAnnotate is way better and you can open/save PDFs you transferred to iAnnotate in iBooks if you want to, the opposite is not possible.

i am sorry but it just makes sense to have an option to save in iBooks from safari
you are missing something:

The iPad is so great i bare even remember to sync it. and yes i do it just to offstore all my purchases and files.

when i research i like to be autonomous to move freely in and out of coffee shops and libraries, not to carry a power cable with me or other wires, and to have everything handy and integrated the iPad is the perfect tool for that.

So when you tell me to get in the chair on my macpro and save my pdf's than sync them in ibooks i get nervous.

just drag it too the general area.
that happened to me too.

Try GoodReader. It handles PDFs easily, real big ones too. Syncs via USB or WIFI. Nice.

I have added a few PDFs to iBooks. The PDFs are graphics heavy on the page. When I open the PDFs, they are very slow to load in iBooks. I have to wait for every page to load in the lower page view before I can start reading the PDF. Has anyone else seen this?