iBooks not syncing between iOS7 and Maverick

I don't appear to have a problem with Mavericks and IOS 7 and books/pdfs etc.

I simply launch iBooks on my iMac, drag n Drop pdf or ePub files into the appropriate area - these are not purchases from iTunes store but 'accquired' from elsewhere.

Then connect device and launch iTunes, select device go to the Books tab on right and tick the items you want and then select sync - bingo.

I think people are forgetting or not realising that the new standalone iBooks app is now what manages the books etc.

What you describe is a huge pain... Why move the functionality out of iTunes, then REQUIRE me to go back into iTunes and do what I did before? Why not just leave it as it was? Or, once I copy it into iBooks, my assumed behavior would be to then have it sync automagically to my other devices and appear in the iBooks app.

This is how it works with Pages, Numbers, Keynote, why not iBooks?

FWIW, I also have a similar gripe about a few other apps: TextEdit (no iOS equiv. app), Stickies (no iOS equiv app), iPhoto (completely different behavior than desktop app and a hokey sync as well), iMovie, and Aperture, file system (why for the love of all that's holy can't I just drop files into a folder and be able to access them on my devices?!? Why does Apple force me to use Dropbox or similar service just to get at non iWork files).

i have tried the sync option on my devices from time to time and always end up with a major problem on my hands. i am really someone who likes to just be able to put content on my devices without having a protocol in place. Apple has always been in love with the synch concept but every time i ok it, i live to regret it. i briefly considered doing it to solve this problem and then moved on to marvin and dropbox instead.

i agree with you. i too enjoy using keynote and pages on everything and have no problems with synching. since apple had such a good model with the iwork synch, i too cannot figure out why that model isn't "good enough" to use on everything else. i sure would be a lot less frustrated.

Me, as well. I just don't see why iBooks cannot use the same Cloud syncing protocol that the iWork Suite uses?? Enough already. I'm back to using Kindle App on Mac and iOS simply because it works (yes, they need to update the app so that whispersync works w/ OS X Mavericks) for most of the main things I need, but it's not because I 'want' to use it. I just need the 'well functioning' iBooks back.

I also have kindle and overdrive on mine. again, third party developer apps solve the problem. I'd rather use iBooks because of its continuous vertical scrolling feature. OTOH, Marvin has a much bigger selection of fonts and also lets you pretty much do away with wasted white space due to excessive margins. I would have never even looked for these other apps if iBooks had kept working properly. i didn't know Marvin existed until two days ago when I became frustrated with iBooks and began searching for other apps. how all of this "promotes" Apple is beyond my imagining.

Thanks - my wife was going crazy trying to figure out why her lessons (which do not come from the iTunes Store) were not syncing with her phone after adding them to iBooks. I told her to try what you suggested and it worked.

I mentioned how people were using Marvin and DropBox, to which she put her hands over her ears and started making "la la la la!" sounds. I guess she doesn't want to have to learn yet another app to make up for the fact that Apple's own apps don't work as expected. 🙂

- Z

quote "she put her hands over her ears and started making "la la la la!" sounds"

Love that 😁

The problem isn't syncing ibooks from computer to phone, it is syncing .pdf files from iBooks on phone to computer.

ok, i decided to sync books on epub only to one ipad. it works. you just load them into the ebooks app and then they automatically appear in synch under an ipad tab. i went ahead and checked synch all. this is far from perfect and i still can't understand why i have programs which operate with less features than an earlier version but if all you want to do is read your epub books, this does work. one major trick i just learned is that i can drop and drag right from the Calibre main window into ibooks. this also puts it automatically into itunes. however, i sometimes lose the cover and itunes and ibooks will not get the cover for me. nor is there any metadata for me to read about the book's contents in ibooks or itunes. in fact, ibooks is incredibly underfeatured. there is almost nothing in its menu on the toolbar or its context menu. i wish CALIBRE was an app on the ipad as it lets me choose the cover, read the book and download all the descriptive matter about the book. warning: on this ipad i can no longer move books from dropbox over there. i will have to move them to Marvin instead. this is because i will mess up the synch process by adding in a book not in ibooks. the minute one adds synch all other options disappear. this is why i hate it.

For some stupid reason, this worked...

I had a problem syncing several random .PDFs and .ePUBs to my iPad (even though a copy was already on there, I would still get the error message from iTunes). I found that if you go into iBooks on Mavericks, go to "File" and then select "Move Books from iTunes" this clears whatever sync issue was going on.

The reason this boggles me is that everything was already transferred to iBooks on Mavericks from iTunes!!! Doing this did absolutely nothing from what I could see (thank God there were no duplicates as one would inutitively expect) other than fix the issue.

Hope this helps someone else until Apple releases a fix!

Hi everyone,

I was having this problem where pdfs gradually disappeared from my ipad but today I had a different problem related to parallels and found that since trying to fix that pdfs are syncing again.

The issue is http://kb.parallels.com/en/10123 where I had to repair disk permissions. Since doing this I have been able to add pdfs to iBooks and these now appear under Books in iTunes and allow me to sync to the iPad as before.

I'd be interested to know if this worked for anyone else?

i wanted to update everyone on where i am with using synch on one ipad and marvin on the other with my epub books. marvin i've discovered will load multiple books directly from dropbox from right within your ipad. this is very nice and it is not buggy. marvin has no problems other than it does not do a continuous vertical flow like ibooks does. that is the one feature which still has me hanging in with ibooks. ibooks synch does have a problem. as i add and delete books from ibooks, i've noticed that it is so buggy that books i deleted in just the last few minutes are now coming back into ibooks on their own! so one may want to be conservative about putting books into ibooks until this is fixed. for now i am using both ibooks and marvin. marvin also supposedly does wireless transfers with calibre. i've added the marvin plugin to caliber and now i have to figure out the sending.

After I tried your suggestion, I then had to go back to iTunes and manually select the recently added books. Thanks for this post! It helped me out a bunch.!

I had this problem as well and doing the "Move Books From iTunes" command with my iPhone connected resolved the issue. It said it "moved" all the books from iTunes, all of which were already actually in iBooks actually, fortunately it didn't duplicate anything, and now when I go back to iTunes I can manually pick and choose the books as in the past and the list of books showing is accurate.

Now I'll have to test deleting some books and see if it stays that way as iTunes was complaining it couldn't find books I had deleted from iBooks prior.

Either way, Apple needs to fix the problem. Seems it shouldn't have been this ridiculously difficult for them to have it sync seeing as they do it just fine with the iWork suite as others mentioned. IMO this iBooks release and its issues is far worse than the Maps release was for iOS.