iTunes doesn't show books to synch to iPad

Hello Pogdaddle,

I see that you're having an issue with your books not syncing from your Mac to your iPad. I'd be happy to provide you with some information that can help with getting your books onto your iPad.

Let's have you take a look at the following article that provides the steps that may help in this scenario:

Books User Guide

"See your books on all your devices in Books

With iCloud, your books, PDFs, collections, highlights, notes, and bookmarks appear automatically in Books on your Mac and your iOS devices when you’re signed in everywhere with the same Apple ID. Then you can easily download the books to read and enjoy them.

See books and PDFs you added to Books

• On your Mac: Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click iCloud. Next to iCloud Drive (make sure it’s selected), click Options, then select Books.

• On your iOS device: Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud (or Settings > iCloud), turn on iCloud Drive, then turn on Books. Next go to Settings > Books, then turn on iCloud Drive."

If the issue remains, or you're receiving an error message, respond back with more details.

Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.

Enjoy your day!

See Managing apps with iTunes 12.7 or later - Apple Community. Management of apps, books, and tones was removed from iTunes in 12.7. You should be able to drag and drop from Finder to the device where it appears in the iTunes sidebar, assuming you can locate the source files however the Books app on Mac does a pretty good job of hiding its sources.

tt2

This happened to me too, very annoying. Tried various stuff including deleting and reinstalling the Books app on my iPad. I have to many (big) books for iCloud to be useful (iCloud Drive is just a major pain on all accounts).

But: I got to see all my books from Books back in iTunes while syncing my iPad by just deleting a file in my iTunes file, called iTunes Library Extras.itdb (iTunes just made a fresh one upon relaunch).

Hope this is more helpful than the useless and very, very annoying push to use iCloud for Books syncing.

I have been having this exact same problem for about the length of time as the original poster. I have to sync my books at least twice a lot of times for them to appear on both my iPad AND my iPhone. It's funny that for both devices, iTunes doesn't seem to even recognize all of the books I have in my Books library on my iMac when this happens (it reads only about 20% of my titles available on Books), but then once I either quit iTunes or at least try to refresh my devices by switching back to my music library, they suddenly reappear. Very perplexing, and, frankly, very annoying.

I have given up trying to get Mac Books/iTunes to sync my books correctly with my iPhone and iPad. With these latest updates (OS X 10.14.5 and iOS 12.3.1), all ePub books that were on my iPad disappeared. Not the first time, but having run through all of the suggestions I've seen in the past few months on different forums and here, none of them work for me now. And the only way I can get ePub files to appear in my iPad is to email them to my iPad, then click on the file and Open with Books. The files are small, so it's possible to do 10 or so at a time.

I suspect all of this will get fixed with the next big iteration of OS X, as it's rumored that iTunes is in for a big overhaul. I sure hope so.

(stuff I've tried:

• delete all extensions/plists/.itdb files associated with iTunes
• log out of all Apple ID, restart all devices
• checked all Preferences/System Pref settings associated with Books, iTunes, iCloud.
• toggled on/off all of those settings

Management of books itself is not the issue here. Syncing books from Books via iTunes to iPad/iPhone devices has NOT been removed from iTunes, au contraire (I'm on 12.9), but Apple sure does it's best at impairing its functionality.

Ah, I forgot that iTunes for Mac is slightly different from iTunes for Windows.

tt2

Hi! I am having a similar issue. My iTunes doesn't even give the option of displaying Books, like it does Music, Movies, etc. I have several books in my Books library on my Mac running Mojave and the latest version of iTunes. It sounds like this is just the way it will be. Is that correct? To get books to my iPad and iPhone, I, too, email the files to myself and then open them in the Books app on the devices. I have looked into doing the procedures suggested here but have not had success. You would think that someone at Apple would address this issue, especially since it appears that there are many people who would like to be able to synch books along with Music and Movies. Just my thoughts. Thanks for listening.

I think you're exactly correct. Apple is in the midst of completely redoing iTunes and everything that's connected to it, so I suspect this issue is just a symptom of this mid-stream situation. I'm just glad there's a simple workaround to being able to get ePub files into my iPhone and/or iPad: just mail them to myself.

I have the exact same, frustrating problem: there are 110 epub books in my Mac OS Books app; yet iTunes shows only 51?!

Every so often the sync carries itself out correctly, and all books show in iTunes and are synced to my iPad. Alas, my next sync almost always reverts back to only showing a fraction of the books contained in my Mac OS Books app

It's disappointing that syncing - such a very basic function - almost never works correctly with books (I have no problems with any other media types)

Lee

Hi there! I encountered the same issue earlier but upon searching for solutions in google, I was able to find one remedy and it worked! Just drag and drop ebooks from the source folder. I am so surprised that it is way easier BUT Itunes won’t display the books, it will just directly sync to the device.

Hi there! I encountered the same issue earlier but upon searching for solutions in google, I was able to find one remedy and it worked! Just drag and drop ebooks from the source folder. I am so surprised that it is way easier BUT Itunes won’t display the books, it will just directly sync to the device.