Books don't copy from Mac

Question

Books don't copy from Mac

I did the iOS 8.3 and MacOSX 10.10.3 updates at the same time, and some books disappeared from my iPhone 6. The only books that disappeared are books that were turned into ePub separately, not the ones I bought from the iBookstore. I can still read these books in iBooks for the Mac and they show up as going to be synchronized in iTunes. How can I get the books to synchronize? Perhaps related to this, iTunes say there are 807 books being synchronized but the connection says there are 770 books on my iPhone.

Now iTunes has started randomly changing from "Sync All Books" to "Sync Checked Books," which is yet another problem. How can I just get iBooks to sync?

Posted on Apr 10, 2015 10:01 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

bechy70

Level 1

0 points

Apr 12, 2015 8:14 PM in response to Russell Kurtz

Russell Have you found out how to fix this? I have the same problem that you have, I'm missing 1595 ebooks from my table even though they are on my iTunes library, but they don't sync. They appear for a moment and the disappear.

If you have any info please let me know.

Thanks

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Answer 2

Apr 12, 2015 8:39 PM in response to bechy70

Bechy70, this exact thing is happening to me. I'm so frustrated.

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Answer 3

Apr 13, 2015 2:38 AM in response to Russell Kurtz

This is the exact thing that is happening to me. Over 1300 books deleted by iBooks after sync. It goes through the syncing process from iTunes, but when iBooks is opened on my iPhone 6 or iPad 2 then they are literay deleted from the device. I checked this under settings/general/usage/storage/manage storage on both devices. The size for iBooks which should be 6.9 gb is decreased to about 250 mb after the app has been opened.

I Have tried restoring from backup, even got a backup from time machine. But I get the same outcome each time. I have turned off iCloud and wifi sync, but still deletes when opened. iTunes changes from sync all books to sync selected books during sync as well.

I Have spent all night working on this. I am astonished that apple would do something like this. Simply astonished. and heartbroken. If this is not fixed it is the final straw for me. I'm done.

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Answer 4

Apr 13, 2015 10:17 AM in response to Russell Kurtz

After much troubleshooting, and calling Apple Support, I was able to restore the books to my iPad 2 and they remained after iBooks was opened without being deleted by restoring the iPad 2 to its factory settings and then syncing the books.Of course, you will have to resort your books again into your collections.

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Answer 5

bechy70

Level 1

0 points

Apr 13, 2015 12:21 PM in response to Gene Surber

Hi Gene, thanks for the update on this. Still upset that they put out the messed up update and we are the one that pay the price. I have over 2500 books, and that is going to take me a lot of my time just to put it back in the categories they belong too. Not fair.

Very disappointed with apple.

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Answer 6

DavidK44

Level 1

25 points

Apr 14, 2015 11:00 PM in response to Russell Kurtz

I'm having the same issue - about a third of my books are not loading from my MacBook Pro to my iPad mini 2.

However, I thought the problem was worse until I realized that on my iPad, at the beginning of the book list, was a new set of 'series' books. For example, all of my iBook-purchased Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot books were now grouped together. The group wasn't being sorted by author - it was appearing at the beginning of the list, rather than under 'Christie' as I would expect it to. So, some of my 'missing' books were present, but not in the place I was expecting them to be. Still, I am missing a significant chunk of my books, and I'm not happy about that....

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Answer 7

May 4, 2015 6:33 PM in response to Russell Kurtz

I've spent a good deal of time on this issue with Tech Support and they have no idea what the problem is. It turns out that, as far as I can tell, every book that I converted using Calibre refuses to sync to my iPhone, and when I try to it resets iTunes to only syncing a certain set of my books (including virtually all the ones I purchased from the iBookStore). I believe that Calibre creates a sort of "Rich ePub" format, which certainly does a better job with covers than does Pages.

It seems to me that this is a relatively serious bug in iBooks for the iPhone. It is not clear whether or not Apple agrees with me.

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Answer 8

DavidK44

Level 1

25 points

May 4, 2015 9:20 PM in response to Russell Kurtz

Thanks for the information. I was also beginning to suspect something about Calibre, as most of my non-syncing books seemed to be conversions via Calibre from Kindle purchases. All of my books are syncing to my iPhone 5S (iOS 8.3 vers. 12F70), but my iPad mini 2 (iOS 8.3 vers. 12F69) only keeps about 500 of the 800 or so books.

I decided to try an experiment, and deleted one of the non-syncing books from my Mac. I then re-converted the original file to ePub using the latest version of Calibre, and then added the new version to my books library again. The re-encoded version synced to my iPad, and did not disappear after syncing.

So, there is definitely something incompatible between older Calibre-converted files and the most recent version of the OS, something that has either been corrected in Calibre or can be corrected by a re-encoding. The problem may be hard to track down, as it is variable in its effect on iPhones and iPads.

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Answer 9

May 5, 2015 6:05 AM in response to DavidK44

The Calibre issue is interesting indeed. All of my books have also been converted by Calibre and the only books that copied over without deleting themselves when iBooks opened appeared to be the iBooks from Apple. However, this doesn't fully explain why .pdf's also deleted from the app when opened.

I'm wondering as well, if when you copied the books over if they copied into their prearranged state within your collection, or if you noticed this as all?

While Apple has recently denied to me that the arrangement of collections gets copied over, only the collections themselves, I have previously found this not to be the case. In the past, if I arranged a book on my iPad,the books placement in the collection would be affected in iBooks on my iPhone as well. Indeed, restoring my iPhone from my iPad, will arrange the books in the same order as they are on my iPad. Whereas restoring the iPhone and copying the books over even through I have collections set to sync, does not copy over this prearrangement. And iBooks in Mavericks behaves the same way (the book will go into the correct collection, but its placement in the collection will be not be affected). This is quite frustrating to me as I have over 1500 books, and would very much like to not have to resort them every time a devise is restored.

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Answer 10

May 22, 2015 8:50 PM in response to Russell Kurtz

I have found out more. Apparently the new version of iBooks requires ePub3 using OCF3; however it is, the new version uses a different kind of file than the old one. The good news is you can drag all your old Calibre-created ePub files into iBooks and it will convert them to the new format, and they will be available and useful. The bad news is that they will take up a lot more space.

With the old version of ePub, the file was a folder that contained the book in HTML format, in chapters if necessary, and some additional information like the CSS document and the cover. That folder was compressed with ZIP. If you knew what you were doing, you could set up the folder, zip it, and change the .zip extension to .ePub; I made a few that way. Just as a test, I took one of the old ePub books, changed the extension to .zip, expanded it with Stuffit Expander, and opened the file. Then I checked the contents of the folder. It included a stylesheet.css file, a content.opf file (that's used by Calibre), a toc.ncx file (table of contents added by Calibre), one .htm file for each chapter, a JPEG version of the cover, a title page.xhtml file (which only contained the cover JPEG), and a mime type document.

When I look at a new version it is different. It is now a Package. When I open package contents I see almost exactly the same contents as the older ePub unzipped (plus an iTunesMetadata.plist file...which shows that iBooks will eventually use "Genre" while iTunes used "Category"...) But in most cases the new version is more then double the size of the old version. Sometimes there's more structure. And files that have DRM have encrypted HTML files.

I spent a lot of time on the phone with Tech Support and was eventually told that I should just get another reader, and it wouldn't have any trouble with the iBooks I had bought on the iBookStore. As it happens, no other reader I tried can even access an ePub through the package that iBooks puts around it. I did really like the Marvin reader; unfortunately, one of its best features--that it can have its bookshelf organized by Calibre--is currently broken. I'm still steamed enough about being treated badly by Tech Support that I am looking for a way to make Marvin my new standard eBook reader, but unfortunately I have over 200 books that I bought with iBooks, and no way to access them using Marvin. I guess I'm stuck with iBooks.

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