Can't open iBooks on Mac Air

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Level 1

10 points

Can't open iBooks on Mac Air

I recently upgraded to Yosemite and iBooks came along with it. I removed iBooks after the initial upgrade so I could continue to manage my PDFs on my IOS devices using iTunes, which is infinitely superior since I am constantly changing the PDFs on my IOS devices. These PDFs are maps, hiking guides etc. that change with each trip.

Well iBooks is back after an update so I relented and decided its time to accept it on the Mac, no matter now poorly it meets my needs. It works fine on the IOS devices, but I would much rather control which PDFs appear on my IOS devices using iTunes.

I've imported my PDFs into iBooks on the Mac. When I click on the Collections view, I see the collections I had previously created on my iPad. But the collections appear appear empty of PDFs -- only purchased books show up. When I click on the List view, I see all the PDFs and they looks like they are in the collections. But if I click on a book or PDF, they won't open.

I imported new PDFs into iBooks and they are not appearing on my iPad, even though I have checked the sync across devices option in the preferences.

MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Jul 3, 2015 12:56 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 4, 2015 10:27 AM in response to leslie02

iBooks itself doesn't sync PDF books between devices. You have to do that in iTunes. Is that what you did, or tried to do?

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Answer 2

leslie02 Author

Level 1

10 points

Jul 4, 2015 10:43 AM in response to Linc Davis

No, the main problem was that I was unable to actually open any books or pdfs in iBooks on my Air Mac or see any books when looking at a collection. I finally tried restarting the machine -- which would have been the first thing I would have done on a Windows machine before reaching out for help -- and this solved that issue. After further reading, it became clear that the synchronization across devices was for the books purchased from the iTunes store only. Since I have less than a dozen purchased books and over 1,000 pdfs, I will have to still use iTunes to do most of the synchronizing. But this will be much more difficult since I will have to identify the 50 to 100 PDFs out of the thousand of pdf files that I want on my iPad and iPhone for any given trip. And now I must do this by checking and unchecking pdfs using the extremely cumbersome icon view for over a thousand PDFs in iTunes that I see only while actually synching a device. I don't know yet whether I will have to do this individually for both devices. The only viable option was to rename all my travel-related PDFs with the state abbreviation to make the identification of the files applicable to any particular trip in a reasonable amount of time feasible. Since I am on the road 50% of the time, this is not a trivial issue.

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