"Unable to download item. Please try again later. "

I'm wondering if it has to do with the iTunes "Digital Booklet" included with the U2 album, since I did download the U2 album too and I believe most Digital Booklets can be viewed in iBooks-- that would at least explain why it seems correlated with both the U2 album and iBooks. Could be completely off-track but... I'm going to try downloading the booklet in iTunes tonight and then syncing it from iTunes to iBooks.

Actually, fairly certain I just fixed it:

On iTunes on a computer, go to the iTunes store then to your account. At the very top I bet you will see something that says:

" Account Information

You have 1 item awaiting download. [Download Now]

Once downloaded to this computer, these items can be played with iTunes or synched to any device you own."

Click on Download Now. You will see the download is the U2 booklet. Now try your device to see if you see the error anymore. It seems to have solved it for me.

My guess for what is happened: You technically purchased the booklet along with rest of the album. If you did it on the device, then it tried to download the booklet but it failed (I'm guessing because of incompatibility with iBooks, or something like that...). Now it is stuck pending a download somewhere, so iBooks continues to try to download it but fails each time because it is incompatible. Going on to your account in iTunes (on your computer) shows the pending download and you activate it to download to your computer instead of your device. After downloading, it is no longer pending so iBooks on your device no longer tries to download it all the time.

Ah, clever!!! I have a feeling you might be right about the booklet. The thought had crossed my mind too but not in any kind of cognizant way. 🙂

But I wonder if anyone has had this problem without downloading the U2 album?

I tried doing this actually. The thing is, you can not sync it to iBooks directly, you need to convert it to .pdf first and that kind of ruins the whole point of doing it. Still though I gave it a try but it didn't work.

I did that as well but guess I am pretty unlucky with these things as it didn't help at all.

Yes, it's probably possible that others have something else queued to download not related to the U2 album, but a similar scenario. Try out the fix I just posted... 95% sure it's fixed and that was the culprit.

Well, spoke too soon. That pending download seems to have fixed that dialog popping up in iBooks, but it still pops up after rebooting the phone. Maybe there is other things unrelated to that booklet it is also trying to download... Or it's a complete red-herring.

Nope, good idea but no dice for me. I didn't see any pending downloads on the page you mentioned (made sure I found the right page, but there was nothing at the top about it). The U2 album and booklet were already on my hard drive, and they came from my iPhone when I sync'd (annoying... why does it do that? I hate sync'ing because it always seems to mess something up). Now I've deleted it all from my PC, but it's still on my phone.

Still might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure. I only ever had the prompt when I reboot my phone. However, if someone is getting it all the time and this trick makes it so they only get it on boot-up, that is a big improvement! I am beginning to lose hope that we'll ever figure out the problem. Maybe we all have the same symptom but different problems.

LInk i found useful .... Hides U2 album I never wanted 😝 http://itunes.com/soi-remove

Well I had a download waiting so followed your instructions. At this moment in time pop up not happened so will be in suspense every time I use phone. Thanks in advance if this is a solution!!

NOOOOOOO got it again. It only seems to appear when I open ibooks and as I have no intention of using this it shouldn't be a big problem. Hopefully an update will iron it out?

I now only get it when I open iTunes, AppStore or iBooks. Seems like an improvement somehow.

Nope, just got it on Safari three times back to back. Guess all we can do is to hope that Apple fixes this in 8.0.1. Sigh...

SSwitched every thing off in iBooks problem gone . Everyone should delete entire U2 back catalogue just in case

ipad air