iBooks that Won't Download or Update

How do you correct a download of a book if the version does not contain the whole book? Only the first chapter appears and I've deleted the book and tried to download it again but the same thing occurs. Also, the book does not contain any pages or a table of contents.

Any suggestions?? Thank you.

Please read this whole message before doing anything.

Back up all data.

Quit iBooks if it's running. Test after taking each of the following steps that you haven't already taken. Stop when the problem is resolved. Quit iBooks again before going on to the next step.

Step 1

Hold down the option key and select Go ▹ Library from the Finder menu bar. From the Library folder, move the following item, if it exists, to the Trash:

Cookies/com.apple.ibooks.cookies

Step 2

Delete this item in the same way:

Preferences/com.apple.ibooks.plist

Step 3

Delete this item:

Containers/com.apple.iBooksX

and move this one to the Desktop:

Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService

Restart the computer. To log out and log back in is not enough—you must restart.

When you launch iBooks, you'll be prompted to reset the library. Confirm. The library will be empty. Rebuild it by downloading your purchases from the iBooks Store and importing any other content you added. You may find the added content in the folder named "com.apple.BKAgentService" that you moved to the Desktop.

This mostly helped.

After following your instructions, the 3 books that I had been unable to successfully download - Swift Documentation Markup, The Swift Programming Language (Swift 2.1 Edition), and Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C (Swift 2.1 Edition) - are now downloaded, but the problem now occurs for another book that had previously downloaded just fine - iPad User Guide 9.2.

I guess I'll try the fix again.

Had to add this to the top of step 3:

• Open iBooks and turn off "Download new purchases automatically."
• Quit iBooks

Have hundreds of books in my library and this one book I purchased about a month ago and am currently reading wouldn't download after doing all those steps multiple times. It appeared in the BKAgentService folder but dragging it to iBooks only added it temporarily before it went back into the cloud.

So I've done all this, and then had the issue occur again, so tried again. I was re-downloading all my books when I deleted one because of an error with the cover (I probably could have just restarted iBooks to fix this error but I was downloading other items). I deleted it from my collection, then from the generic book collection, then from all. I got an error that the item cannot be downloaded when I tried to re-download it. Going to the iBookstore to my purchased items, it seems the iBookstore thinks this book is still downloaded.

The only way I was able to get this book back without taking all those steps (which is a pain with over 200 books I want to organize and download most of them, with many being 50MB to 700MB) was to transfer the download from my MacBook to my iMac, which is the one is having the issue. You can drag the ePub from the other Mac to your download folder easy by dragging and dropping onto the folder in your Dock or an open Finder window, then AirDrop to the other Mac and then drag it into iBooks, and confirm to replace the file. So this workaround won't work if you don't have two Macs, but it is possible you can try to get the ePub file by using a second user account, downloading from iTunes on a PC, or from a Time Machine backup.

My iMac doesn't offer a Library folder under the "GO" drop down menu in finder.

This did not work for me. My Library gets rebuilt, but I still cannot download the books that are saved in my iCloud.

I have multiple systems, running different OS versions, and this is only an issue for the one that is still on Mavericks (due to compatibility testing purposes).

Might that be a reason why? If all my other systems' OS have been upgraded, except one, could that prevent ibooks from D/Ling?

You have solve my problem and bug too after months of trials to fix-it 🙂.

Linc Davis you should be on the Apple DataBase Articles it work 100 %.

Now iPhones 6 Plus and Mac Pro iBooks Sync and Download perfectly.

I found this helpful... helpful to understand how silly Apple can be about fixing simple problems... or creating complex ones.

Maybe it wasn't so helpful.

What needs to be added to it is how to sync non-iBook imports, specifically to another device, so that they can be synced back to the newly bare iBooks repository on the Mac. Such as this link:

Use iBooks with PDF documents on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

Thank you Linc! I wondered if deleting some of those Library files might fix this, but I had no idea which ones to get rid of. Your solution worked perfectly.

Thank you so much - just deleting the cookies worked 🙂

HI, I just had the same problem with The Swift Programming Language. Right-Click -> delete on the book in my library fixed it. It then appeared available for download in version 3.1.

Thanks so much! Step 2 did it for me :-)
I was already very frustrated with the sync-issues and now everything works perfectly!

Have a nice day!