How to transfer iBooks books & PDFs from old iPad to new iPad?
(Well, it seems my title got truncated; originally it read: How to transfer iBooks books & PDFs from old iPad to new iPad?)
I've recently gotten an iPad Air to replace my previous iPad 2. I have a bunch of books and PDFs in iBooks on the old iPad, and want to transfer them to the new iPad.
A search of Apple Support informs me that anything I've purchased from iBooks can be downloaded at any time to any of my devices (works like Amazon's Kindle system, apparently), but nearly all the content I have in iBooks on the iPad I've downloaded from other sources, so it won't be in my iBooks Store account (I might have bought one book there).
I've also seen several instructions on how to copy all my data from the old iPad to the new via Backup & Restore, but that seems to require restoring the new iPad to factory setup, which would delete everything I have on it now – including a bunch more books I've gotten since I started using the new iPad. And I don't want to copy everything, only the books/PDFs (the new iPad has everything I want, except for the books).
Since there seems to be no way to transfer files directly from one iPad to the other, it seems it must be done via iTunes on my MacBook Pro (and I want to copy all the books/PDFs to the computer anyway). So I connected the iPad 2 to my MacBook Pro (OS X 10.9.4) and opened iTunes (11.3.1). Then clicked on the iPad's name in the sidebar to the left, and on Books below it. I see a list of the books on the iPad. I check the little boxes by all their names to select them (not sure if that's necessary, but it seems like a good idea), then click on the Sync button at the lower right, to the right of the bar at the bottom of the window with colored bands showing memory usage on the iPad. A message appears saying "The app 'iBooks' was not installed on the iPad '[name]' because the app could not be found."
But iBooks is already on the iPad; I have it open and see the list of books in it, which matches the list shown in iTunes. The message has a "More Information" button; I click that and it opens an Apple Support article titled "iOS: An app you installed unexpectedly quits, stops responding, or won’t open": "Learn what to do if you see one of these issues with an app you downloaded from the App Store on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch: The app unexpectedly quits; The app stops responding; You can’t open the app." But none of these apply; the iBooks app is on the iPad, and works fine there.
The article suggests: (1) Restart the App. I've done that, no help. (2) Restart your device. Done that, no help. (3) Update your device software and your apps. The iPad is running iOS 6.1.3, iBooks 3.1.3; not the latest versions, no, but I'd rather not update it to newer, bigger, more power-hungry versions if I don't have to. Is it that iTunes 11 doesn't work with iOS 6? I haven't seen this stated anywhere.
So instead I click the OK button on the message, but nothing further happens, so far as I can tell: None of the books/PDFs on the iPad (about 380MB) appear in iBooks on the MacBook Pro.
I click on "Books" in the row of words across the top of the iTunes window, and it shows me the single PDF presently in iBooks on the MacBook Pro. I click the box by "Sync Books", and a message appears: "Are you sure you want to remove existing music, movies, TV shows, books, and tones from this iPad and sync with this iTunes library?" Well, no, that's exactly what I DON'T want to do. I don't want to erase the 380MB of books and PDFs on the iPad and replace them with the single PDF now in iBooks on the MacBook Pro. I want to copy the books from the iPad 2 to iTunes, so I can copy them back to the new iPad Air (if, God willing, I can figure out how to do that without erasing the books now on the iPad Air).
I've been working with Macintosh computers for over 26 years. It's always been a fairly simple process to copy files from one computer to another. I don't want to "sync" all the data (address book, email, God knows what else) on the iPad with the corresponding information on the MacBook Pro – especially if that will erase everything on the iPad (which has information not on the MacBook Pro, e.g. 380MB of books). I just want to copy the books and PDFs in iBooks from the old iPad to the MacBook Pro, then to the new iPad, adding them to the books on the new iPad, so I don't lose anything.
Can anybody give me a clue?
iPad Air Wi-Fi, iOS 7.1
