How to delete iBook items in iCloud but leave them on devices

Question

How to delete iBook items in iCloud but leave them on devices

I keep a lot of PDFs and some ebooks in iBooks on my MacBook Pro. I made the mistake of clicking on the option to store my library on iCloud. I was looking to put one particular pdf in the cloud storage so it would sync to my other devices. What happened was it uploaded lots of my laptop's library until the iCloud storage was full. Now I get a message that my iCloud storage is full, please buy more.

How do I undo this? From searching, it looks like my options are to delete the material everywhere (iCloud and all devices) or delete it on my device only. What I want to do is delete it from the cloud but leave it on my laptop.

I also need to undo automatically storing future things i put in iBooks on iCloud.

Thanks,

Don

OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Mar 11, 2017 6:27 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 26, 2017 12:36 AM in response to RJG1999

That doesn't work. If you turn that off, you can't even see the items on your device. If you turn it back on, and then say delete, choosing to delete from iCloud but keep on your device, it STILL deletes it from your device. So once again, Apple in their wisdom has done something which is "helpful", but has unintended (?) negative consequences for users. Or maybe they're just trying to get you to pay for more space in iCloud Drive 😟

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Answer 2

RJG1999

Level 4

2,951 points

Mar 26, 2017 7:14 AM in response to Karen Koch

One last thing to try. Make sure you download them to your device first before turning off the sync to iCloud. You can do that by clicking the small cloud icon in the upper right of the book cover. My understanding is that once they are downloaded locally on your device, they you should be able to turn off iCloud sync.

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Answer 3

RJG1999

Level 4

2,951 points

Mar 11, 2017 8:42 AM in response to MacDontheshiney

Hi - the option to turn off the iBook syncing is actually outside of the iBooks app. 😕

Instead, go to System Prefrerences - iCloud. Click Options next to iCloud Drive and deselect iBooks. That should remove them from iCloud and leave them intact on your Mac.

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