Add PDFs to new iBooks won't sync to iPad

Well, this question is 4 years old, but now it seems everything happens mysteriously in the iCloud Drive: https://tidbits.com/article/16378

Mike, I think I just figured it out (for me anyway) for syncing via WiFi.

My PDFs in iBooks Mac weren't showing up in iBooks iOS & this is how I fixed it - it's syncing seamlessly now 🙂

After dragging PDFs into iBooks Mac,

I went to iTunes for Mac

Clicked on my device e.g. iPad

Clicked on 'Books' from along the menu that says 'Summary - Apps - Tones' etc.

Ticked the 'Sync Books' checkbox

Selected the 'All books' button

Made sure that under the menu ('Books') I had selected 'Books and PDF files'

And then pressed the sync button at the bottom right of iTunes. It worked.

It's a 'set it and forget it solution' - after doing this I no longer need to interact with iTunes for syncing PDFs & books. Even when I rename collections on iBooks Mac, it transfers seamlessly across to iBooks on my iPad/iPhone.

Hope that helps - it certainly wasn't obvious to me.

Best,

Haider

Haider, I appreciate the thought, but this did NOT work for me. This is NOT solved. I did all you said. Not only did it not sync PDFs between iBooks on my iPad and my Mac, about 1/2 of the PDFs that were on my iPad now disappeared. This solution only made things worse. This problem with iBooks for Mac is NOT solved.

I appreciate the response. However, this was the very first thing that I tried, and it does NOT work. Everything I put into iBooks just sits there - both on iOS 7 (iPad) and on my MBP (OS 10.9). If I drag something into iBooks on my iPad, iBooks on the MBP doesn't recognize it. If I drag something into iBooks on the MBP, the iPad doesn't know it is there. So iBooks is still a useless, one-way container, all of this only happening after I installed Mavericks on my MBP. And of course iTunes will no longer sync wirelessly, which may or may not be related. It shouldn't matter since iBooks is SUPPOSED to sync through iCloud - but it doesn't. And yes, since the wirless sync with iTunes has quit, I am syncing regularly wired - and iBooks still will not sync.

But thanks for trying.

I have this identical problem with Mavericks. I can add PDF files to iBooks on my Mac, but these do not sync to my iPad, and they do not show up in the Books collection of iTunes. Other PDF files from before I upgraded to Mavericks sync just fine. I just can no longer add any more PDF files to my iPad.

I have exactly the same problem. I know that iBooks for Mac is communicating with iBooks for iPad, because the collection I created on my Mac for one category of PDFs appeared instantly on my iPad. Unfortunately, the 20+ PDFs that I put in that collection didn't come along for the ride.

I tried syncing via iTunes, but only got a message telling me that this was now an iBooks feature. Interestingly, when I went to iBooks, it gave me the choice of moving iTunes books into iBooks. When Itried to do this -- expecting to get a message that the books were already there -- instead I got confirmation that it was moving 151 books drom iTunes to iBooks.

And they're still not on my iPad.

This is really annoying. I keep a lot of personal and professional documents in PDF format. I was truly geeked to try managing these docs from my Mac, since it's a real annoyance to download, open, and properly file PDFs on the iPad.

It is absolutely ridiculous that the only way I can efficiently move a 10mb pdf book file from my MacBook to my iPod, with all their superfast hitech interconnectivity, is to send it across to servers on the other side of the world using DropBox. I really love all my Apple stuff I have been using for years but the new regime of denying functionality in order to try to contol users leads to these moronic situations.

I have this problem, too, only with epub files. I add the new Book to iBooks on my Mac, then sync my iPad via iTunes. All the new collections come over, so I know a sync is happening, but no new book. I look in Books -- nope. I look in the collection it should be in -- nope. I search for it -- nope.

I have the Sync Books option "Selected books" checked, and in the past I've needed to find the book in the list after the sync, check it individually, then either sync again or it just shows on my iPad. This time, nope.

I finally got it into my iPad iBooks by downloading it from an external source. Stupid way to have to do it.

Hi Mike,

I too have this problem. The sync of pdf files between iMac and iPad in iBooks just doesn't work. I see the same symptoms as everyone else here - if I create a new Collection and then sync, the new Collection appears on the other machine, but none of the pdfs I put in there - the new Collection is empty.

This goes to the wider issue that there is no iCloud facility to store and display pdf files. Any iBooks solution would depend on having an iOS or Mavericks platform available when you want to see the files in a different location, and that may not be so; you may be stuck with a Windows machine for example in which case iBooks wouldn't be available.

The only way round this I've found is to send an email to your iCloud email address, with the pdf file as an attachment to the email. Even then, when you're in iCloud and you click on the attachment, it downloads it to your local machine and doesn't open it in situ so to speak, so you could achieve exactly the same result with any email address.

I've read that PDFPen works with iCloud, but does it 'work with iCloud' in the same way as Preview does, i.e. it allows you to store pdfs in the cloud but you can't get at them through icloud.com?

Another odd thing is that none of the Android web browsers will work with icloud.com. Dolphin will at least let you log in (none of the others will - not even Safari for Android!!) but all you can use is the Find my iPhone app - you can't open any docs or spreadsheets. Strange, because on Windows 7 they open in Internet Explorer with no problem.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for that. OK, so it now syncs, but one way only - from iMac to iPad. So if I create/download a pdf on the iMac and then sync, it duly appears in iBooks on the iPad. But not the other way round, i.e. if I create or download a pdf on my iPad and put it into iBooks on the iPad and then sync, it doesn't appear in iBooks on the iMac. But strangely, if I create a new collection in iBooks on the iPad, and put a pdf in it, and then sync, the new collection appears in iBooks on the iMac, but it's empty.

And I think we're still left with the problem of how to access iCloud pdfs from a non-Apple platform. iBooks isn't in icloud.com.

Finally found the answer, for which I'm indebted to member CSound1. Install Documents to Go on the iPad, and Documents to Go Dektop on the Mac. On the Mac, there's a folder called Mobile Documents which lives in a hidden folder called Library under Macintosh HD/Users/<your userid>. You can see Library by clicking Go on the Finder toolbar and then pressing the Option key.

That Mobile Documents folder contains a subfolder for each iCloud app - Pages, Numbers and, most importantly here, Preview. Each of these subfolders contains all the iCloud docs created by the app in question. In DTG Desktop on the Mac, drag and drop the Mobile Documents folder into the list of folders to sync with DTG on the iPad. This gives full bi-directional sync - on the iPad you'll be able to see all the PDFs that Preview has stored in iCloud, and if you create a PDF on the iPad you can save it to the Preview docs subfolder in the Desktop/Mobile Documents folder in DTG. Next time you sync with the DTG desktop, the file will be accessible from the Mac using Preview.

The issue I am finding with this is...at least for me...it is a one way sync. The wifi sync works fine, but once I delete a PDF from my phone, it stays in iBooks on my MacBook Air. It doesn't work like I would expect it to work. Nothing like bookmarks, contacts, Reading List items or even iWork documents.