Q: iBooks 1.5 (El Cap 10.11.4) only opens PDF's in Preview.
In all previous versions of iBooks, it honored the system setting for what App to use to open a PDF. On my system that is Adobe Acrobat. iBooks 1.5 does not honor that system setting an always open PDF's in preview.
Does anyone know how to get iBooks to honor the system setting?
iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X El Capitan (10.11), 32GB
Posted on Mar 24, 2016 9:59 PM
Ok, I figured out the problem. If you turn on the iBooks.app in the iCloud Drive Preference in iCloud Preferences (or you respond positively to the prompt the first time you use iBooks 1.5 as to whether it should use iCloud Drive), what happens is that all the PDF files that were in iBooks on the Mac are moved to iCloud Drive -AND- the default app to open those PDF's (in get info) is changed from whatever it was set at to iBooks 1.5 (which is effectively like setting it to Preview). Those PDF's now live in the Cloud and although it is possible to locate them and do a get info on them, any attempt to change the default app fails, it cannot be changed from iBooks 1.5.
So the solution for me was to turn off iCloud Drive for iBooks.
But if you do that you will lose access to those PDF's in the cloud and they will not automatically be put back on your Mac. So before I turned off iCloud Drive for iBooks I copied all the PDF's from iCloud while I could still access them. The easiest way to do that is to just drag them from each collection in iBooks to a folder on the Mac. Then you can add them back from the folder into iBooks after you turn off iCloud Drive for iBooks.
Kapisch
Posted on Mar 25, 2016 10:09 PM