Enabling "Sync Books" in iTunes wants to remove songs

Few simple steps to get over this:

1. First download "iBooks" free app from itunes

2. Add your "PDF file" into the "Library" in iTunes

3. When you try to sync it will give the above message - "will wipe all songs ...."

4. In iTunes "File" click on "Transfer purchases from your iPad"

5. You will see "Books" appear now under "Devices"

6. Drag and drop the "PDF file" from "Books" in "Library" to "Books" in "Devices"

7. Job done :-)

"No advantage" to manually managing? Maybe if you have a small music library or rarely add to it, but if you regularly buy and rip CDs to your device it is much less of a hassle to just drag 'n drop 'em over instead of messing around with playlists or what have you.

The only disadvantages to manually managing your device arise entirely from Apple's ridiculous updating and syncing problems.

It's a valid point of view, but I suspect you've just underestimated the power of smart playlists. When I rip or download a new CD into our family's library I mark the grouping field with the names of the members of the familiy that like that artist. Next time I connect their iDevice and sync they automatically get the new selections. If I correct a detail on an album, every device gets that correction next time they sync. In addition, updated play counts & play dates and ratings sync in both direction. My library is too big to go on my iPhone, but including playlists with rules such as 2gb of most recently played, 2b of most recently updated, 2Gb of most often played etc. gives me access to a useful cross selection of stuff I like without having to manually wade through my library and decide what to put on and what to leave off. I can tweak the rules to exclude accidentally including stuff I don't want on it, or add just a playlist for excluding specific things.

If that sounds too complicated then simply syncing with a single playlist called say "My iPhone" would have all the "benefits" of manually managing the iPhone but would let me do it whether or not the device was connected. - an offline editor if you will. And if I had to restore the phone then I wouldn't have lost my selections.

But hey, we each find a way that works for us. Enjoy the music...

tt2

If you sync with another library it wants to delete everything that isn't from that library. But what you can do is this if you don't mind not being able to download from itunes any past purchased stuff for 90 days but if you just want to add the new stuff it seems to work

1) purchase the book

2) Don't sync

3) go to your ipad and open the book store you will see your purchase... download it directly from itunes

If you used another apple ID for other stuff you will lose the ability to download past purchases from that account for 90 days but you will have the new stuff

i was having the same problem. my bookd wouldn't sync to my iphone, altho itunes said they were synced, and i had all books checked. ****, my audiobooks synced fine. idk why i lost al my books and only 1 PDF book was showing up. i tried draging onto i phone, deleteing ibooks, re-downloading...nothing worked...UNTIL FINALLY....i figured it out. i had to manually drag the books from "Library - Books" to "Store - Purchased" idk why...but that worked. i did that...re-synced..and my books and all my PDFs are back in ibooks....weird....FIX THIS APPLE!!!

These steps worked. I was trying to transfer PDF files to my iPad and ran into the same "remove all music, video and TV shows files". Once the iPad was synced with my PC, I went to the Books section of the Library in iTunes and dragged the files to the Books section on the iPad. Each time I dragged a PDF file, iTunes updated the file inside iBooks as within the PDF section. It worked. Thanks.

The drag and drop icon changes to "Not allowed" when it hovers over the folders in the device.

I am really stuck and frustrated that I just cant copy one PDF to my iPad from my new Laptop I bought cause

my old one died. So yes my iPad is talking to a new laptop - and I have yet to retrieve all my stuff from my old

laptop's harddisk. I get all those errors that this thread is talking about synching etc. But I am still not able to copy one PDF from my laptop to the iPad yet - Dran n Drop doesnt work for me - I tried moving it to Purchases and then tried to copy etc. The past menu item is enabled when I clicked on Books folder for my device - but doesnt do anything. I really feel I am stuck. I have a lot of PDF files on my iPad manually copied earlier which I dont to loose. These are all free PDFs downloaded from different sites, like apache etc. Collecting them again will be a big hassle, though free. Why does Apple have to make copying one PDF from a new laptop, which is now authorised, to copy to iPad so difficult.

This totally works....even for PDF's that weren't actually purchased but that are on a hard drive. But, for me, it only worked when the iPhone was connected via USB to my laptop, not via Wifi.

So, once again...

Connect iPhone to computer via USB cable.

Check "Transfer purchases...."under File in iTunes

Drag and drop book, PDF, etc. from iTunes Library to Books under iPhone.

Voila!

I wish I had found this thread at the beginning of this evening.

- I bought my first books through iTunes for my son's birthday. And I was helping my son add these couple of books to his iPod Touch on my wife's computer.

- I thought books needed to be synced. So, I selected "Sync Books" in iTunes (I ignored the warning) and not only was my son's music erased but then I could not add any playlists to the iPod Touch to properly put back his music.

- This seemed like an OS glitch so, I did a clean restore of the iPod Touch.

- I again selected "Sync Books" in iTunes and again I could not add my son's music with playlists to the iPod Touch.

- So, I did a second restore.

- After much searching on the web, I found this thread. And this time I followed the instructions from berlingoodman's post;

"Check "Transfer purchases...."under File in iTunes

Drag and drop book, PDF, etc. from iTunes Library to Books under iPhone."

* Then the books transferred to my son's iPod Touch without syncing!

After this I was able to sync apps and still manually add all the playlists/music to my son's iPod Touch which he prefers! (Two hours total were spent on this.)

* The problem imo is that Apple has completely tied syncing books with syncing music. It would be nice if users had the option as with apps where they can be synced but at the same time music can then be added manually.

I read through all these replies and the closest to what I think you were asking was the copy/paste solution, but it's not as simple as it should be. In Library/Books, right-click on the book you want to transfer to your device and select copy. Then in Devices/Books, you can't just right-click and paste as there is nowhere for you to paste it. You have to go through the Edit menu to paste. Worked a treat for en ebook I've been working on and wanted to preview on all my devices, but I didn't want to sync them all to my MacBook Pro. I hope it works for anyone else who has an epub file of their own they want to add to a device.

Thanks for all your ideas - but nothing worked for me under iOS 6.0.

I have a couple of business PDFs on my iTunes and usually had them on my iPhone as well. Now this isn't possible any more, no copy/paste, no purchased-trick works.

Is also doesn't show any "books" in the capacity line (colored line at the bottom when syncing) at all.

Wonder if that has anything to do with that?

I really need these files on the phone, so what could I do?

Will erase everything, again ⚠, and try once more.

Am really frustrated, this cannot be SO difficult, hm?

Cheers for all.

@Zughafen, at least as a stopgap measure, you could download another PDF viewing app on your iPhone (Stanza and Kindle are free IIRC). You can copy PDF's from a computer to those apps through the "File Sharing" function.

Sync your device (no need to sync Books or do anything to erase your data -- just plug it in).

Click the device listing in the left-hand pane of iTunes.

This should display a summary page for your device, above which are several tabs (Summary, Info, Apps, Tones, etc.). Click Apps.

Scroll to the bottom of that page, which will show any apps on your device which can accept outside files. Click on the app you want to use to read the files, then click the "Add..." button at the bottom of the list of files on the right (the list may be empty). Then find the file on your computer, et voila.

Anyway, you should try the Transfer Purchases option once just in case -- I just did it myself and it appears to have worked.

I have just had this on my brand new iPad mini.

***?

I opted for the sync and delete in the hope I only have to re-install my music and TV shows once but I am not even slightly impressed by this bug.

Oh and it DOES delete everything, just as it says on the wrapper.

This awful syncing behaviour is still happening in iOS7.0.3

From purchase, I have always had my iPad in iTunes set to "Manually Manage Music and Videos" and all "Sync" checkboxes turned off. It has only ever been associated with my desktop computer.

It has the following content:

Apps (downloaded on the iPad only)
Music, videos and PDFs (manually added via iTunes)

Recently I decided I wanted to change Books from manual to automatic syncing, leaving everything else manual.

So I set Books to "Sync All Books" (with the iTunes > Books folder on my PC). You'd think that would mean:

- Sync All Books from PC

- Leave Music and Videos to manual syncing

But no, syncing books turns off the "Manually Manage Music and Videos" option, like that makes any sense whatsoever.

So now all my music and videos have been deleted from my iPad. Just wonderful Apple, really stellar job.

It's quite simple, this is what your users want Apple:

To individually choose which media type(s) to automatically sync or manually manage. So:

1) Get rid of the "Manually Manage Music and Videos" option on the Summary screen, it's misleading. Or rename it to what it actually does.

2) When a user clicks a "Sync" checkbox, mark that for automatic syncing based on whether to user wants all or selected items, then when syncing, sync those and ONLY those items checked. Everything else leave to MANUAL.

I don't expect Apple to do anything about this, as usual, they know best.

And the situation is even worse now because of the iBooks app. You can still sync books from iTunes to an iOS device even if the books have been imported into iBooks--but you have to turn on books syncing in iTunes...and then you have the ridiculous problem of having all of your music and videos--just like you described.

So I have all of my books in iBooks and not in iTunes any more. There is no way to directly put those books onto an iOS device from iBooks. And I can't turn on books syncing in iTunes because it will delete all of my music on my iPhone. Really nice...not.