Deselecting ePubs to sync

I had over a 1000 ePubs synced to my iPad-1, but the iBooks app became very slow because of it. I decided to remove most ePubs and just sync a few. I first disabled syncing of books in iTunes, did a resync and all books have been removed as expected. Now I want to sync just a set of 40 books, but when I try to do this, all books are already selected and I would have to first deselect every single book. Looks like removing all ePubs from the library first is the only way to do this. Surely this can be done much easier..... Can it?