How do I sync my PDFs from iBooks on my iPad to iBook on my Mini and Maverick desktop?

The sync collections setting doesn't copy items between devices, all it does is keep the books/PDFs that you already have on those devices in-line i.e. if you have a book already on multiple devices/computers and you move it into a collection on one device then it will be moved into the same collection on the others devices/computers that it's on.

You will need to connect your iPad to your Mac's iTunes and do File > Devices > Transfer Purchases to copy them over to your Mac (that should copy PDFs and/or epubs that are in the iBooks app on your iPad, not just actual ibooks), and then in the iBooks app on your Mac do File > Move Books From iTunes.

You can then sync them to your other device by connecting it to your Mac's iTunes, and the books/PDFs that you have in the iBooks app on your Mac should show on the device's Books tab in iTunes for being available for syncing to it.

e.g. connect the other device and select it on the left-hand sidebar of your Mac's iTunes (you can enable the sidebar via option-command-S), and on the right-hand side of the iTunes screen use the Books tab to select and sync them

Hi did anybody get a fix to this. I have PDFs on my iPad 3 I have sorted then into collections I hen have all the sync options ticked in setting. I have iPhone 4s and again all settings are correct. I also have iMac running mavericks with iBooks configured same apple account. I find that whilst the collection folder titles get syncd the contents do not. The PDF files on my iPad do not sync to iMac or iPhone just the collection labels. I do not want to sync via my iTunes on iMac I want to simply sync over the air. Does this work any ideas

Read my above reply, the 'sync collections' does not copy the actual PDFs or books between devices, you need to copy/sync them onto each device/computer that you want them - all the sync collections setting does is if you copy a PDF or book into a collection on one device then for each other device/computer that you have that PDF/book on it will be moved into the same collection on it.

If you read my first reply then you will see that your statement :

Nothing works except perhaps sending yourself an email with your PDF and opening it on iBook on each device.

is wrong. Have you read and tried that ? You won't be able to email protected PDFs.

In terms of Apple adding the capability then leave feedback for them : http://www.apple.com/feedback/

You did both parts, File > Devices > Transfer Purchases when the device is connected to your computer's iTunes, and the File > Move Books From iTunes in the iBooks app ? Do any ibooks that you have in the iBooks app on your iOS device copy over ?

ok this is a workaround not a fix, the answer is Ibooks doesnt sync between devices. You can only sync from one device to Itunes and then Itunes to other devices. This means thsat every time you get a new pdf on one device you will have to transfer it to Itunes then move from Itunes to Ibooks and sync on the other devices. In my opinion that is hopeless it means your sync revolves around remembering to transfer the PDF files, then remembering which ones you want , then having the time to connect a cloud connected device to an Imac and doing all the transfer steos again. That is a dark ages solution I think. If I am wrong and Icloud does sync between devices like photostream then please somebody tell as it is the solution we are looking for. In the mean tie I have raised this as an request with apple on their improvements like as suggested by KP, didnt get a response so who knows if it wil get fixed or incorporated. We need PDF or Ibooks stream

hi can i add, yes I have just retried both parts this doesnt work. It transfers the purchases - books bought in appstore. Does not transfer the PDFs in the colections folders of PDFs folder, thus when copying from Itunes to Ibooks on the IMAC (in ibooks app) it does not find the PDFs. In Itunes the PDFs are not shown agains tthe IPAD in Ibooks, but they are on the IPAD in collections. Bizarre thing is if I select Books from the Left hand menu in Itunes (the menu with music , movies playlists etc) it shows all my PDFs and gives an option showing them ticked. However when I select Books across the top itunes menu only a handful show up, these are the PDFs I had on IMAC and the books bought in appstore. Also have not got sync books checked from the top menu, if i selct this then Itunes asks me if I want to remove all existign stuff and resync - I dont know why it is telling me it will resync music - it is already synched. I dont want to have it remove my PDFs and resync as I have the PDFs on my IPAd and want them into my IMAC. Looks like only way is to email them all to IMAC and get them into Ibooks then Sync them all back out to devices. .. Dark ages any ideas welcom. tried to inset images to illustrate but does not work for some reason

And to be FRANK here, the reason this (and other) threads are so ****** LONG is because in EVERY iteration of the press, information and evne SUPPORT documents it LEADS ONE TO BELIEVE that all one has to do is tunr on "Sync Collections" to get ALL not SOME collections to SYNC...and give that the PDF collection is a DEFAULT in there already BY Apple, one is totally reasonable to have assumed that of all IT would sync proeprly...they need to explain this better and we wouldnt all be wasting so much time... 😟

I have had the exact same problem, having tried everything listed above to no avail.

Because it says it is supposed to sync (by implication) everything across devices it appears to be a defficiency that needs to be addressed and hopefully will be.

Have you tried downloading "Calibre" - I use this programme to convert my pdf files to epub, a quick and easy process

http://calibre-ebook.com/download_osx

Click OK and it will convert then just add file to ios X iBooks and sync as usual