Syncing iBooks on IOS 8.4

[spetersen]

I hope this is the correct place to ask this question. Let me know if it's not.

 

I'm a programmer with 20+ years experience. I've got an iBook running the latest Yosemite, and a 128gig wifi iPad running the latest IOS. (And yeah, I've got it mostly filled up. Only 20gig free, and I don't have all of my tech videos loaded.)

 

I'm having a really frustrating problem trying to sync my iBooks library to my iPad. I have 300+ books, mostly epubs, some pdfs. Some came from the iBooks store, some from other publishers. Some have DRM, many do not. (They're all legal, I don't pirate material.) I believe my problem started with IOS 8.4, at least that's when I first noticed it.

 

I can sync my iPad and all the books appear to transfer correctly. But as soon as I open iBooks on the iPad, it pauses for a moment and 100+ books then disappear from the iPad. I haven't identified any commonality to the books that are deleted versus those that work. It's always the same books.

 

This is really a serious problem. I carry my technical library with me, that's the main reason I bought an iPad! And this makes my library much less useful. To say nothing of making several thousand dollars of material unavailable to me when I need it most!

 

I don't use Apple Match, I don't use the new iCloud music thingie. I tried a complete factory reset on the iPad. At this point, I'm desperately looking for an alternative to iBooks for the iPad, but I really, seriously don't want to have to redownload 100+ books as pdfs... :-(

[kirkmc]

To be honest, I so totally hate reading on an iPad - the glare - that I don't sync any books to mine. I do occasionally open a manual that I store on Dropbox on the iPad, but I read other books on my Kindle. So I have never synced more than a few books to my iPad, and I haven't heard of any specific problems. Of course, syncing anything is a crap shoot these days, so I'm not surprised, but I don't know where to begin to try and troubleshoot this.

 

I'd suggest GoodReader, which lets you sync files via iTunes File Sharing, or via any kind of server (Dropbox, FTP, etc.). It's great for PDFs. I'm not sure if it handles ePubs though.

[spetersen]

I was afraid of that. Sigh. I have found various complaints online about syncing books in the latest IOS, but I'm not seeing any solutions... :-(

 

Well, maybe somebody else will have a miracle up their sleeves... <wry g> I've looked at Kindles, but I really need just one thing to carry that does everything, rss feeds, books, pictures, movies & videos, email, web...

 

As far as I can tell, Goodreads doesn't handle epubs, just pdfs. I may be desperate enough to try that route, if nothing else works. But Goodreads also says it can't handle pdfs with DRM, and I suspect that some of mine do have DRM. (I try to avoid it, but some publishers insist.)

 

Syncing has been stable for me for several years, that's why this is so frustrating!

 

FWIW, I started using fruux.com to sync my Calendars and Contacts several years ago, the last time I had trouble with Apple messing up my syncing. That's been stable since I switched. I've occasionally thought about switching back to Apple but this is really discouraging me from THAT idea. <sour g>

 

Anyway, thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it!

[kirkmc]

iBooks can't handle PDFs with DRM either, as far as I know. I think you can only read those with an Adobe product, because they're the ones who've implemented DRM for that format.

[spetersen]

iBooks can't handle PDFs with DRM either, as far as I know. I think you can only read those with an Adobe product, because they're the ones who've implemented DRM for that format.

 

 

You may be right, I don't play with PDFs much, I strongly prefer epub. Argh.

 

Well, I'll update the thread if I figure anything out.