Transfer of books between my two iPads

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Level 1

4 points

Transfer of books between my two iPads

I bought a new iPad and I am about to sell my old one.

Before that, I need to transfer about 350 “books” from the old iPad to the new one.

The large majority of them are not purchased books. They are for the most part documents of mine saved as PDF or EPUB, full of written annotations made by Apple Pencil or of highlightings. Others are manuals, that is free technical PDF downloaded from the web.

It looks there is no practical way to transfer them between the two devices. One is supposed to transfer them one by one!

The backup does not restore them and selecting more than one for transfer does not work. Moreover highlights made on EPUBs can only be saved by exporting notes by email (that is you cannot have the same EPUB with the same highlights of the new iPad). If you made notes by pencil on a PDF you can have them on the other iPad sending the PDFs one by one by AirDrop.

All of this looks to me really preposterous. Either this is the result of extreme carelessness or it is a not too hidden method to force you to buy books (and to discourage the use of the Books app as a common reader).

Posted on Jan 15, 2024 8:43 AM

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Answer 1

diciotto Author

Level 1

4 points

Jan 16, 2024 4:05 AM in response to diciotto

I must confess I didn't get it right in the first place (I hadn't disabled iCloud for books). Apologies. But then I did it and started it over. Same results. No book I had previously loaded on the old iPad was transferred on the new one. Only those downloaded from the Store.

Let me make sure I got it right this time: you said I had to enter iCloud in the settings and switch Books off, before doing the backup I wish to restore on the new iPad. Right? Anything else?

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