What was once a simple paradigm between syncing books on desktop machines and iPhones are now a mess thanks to iCloud, the detachment of iDevices from the desktop, bust mostly just plain half baked implementations. I simply want to take a PDF or eBook and read it either on my desktop, my iPad, or iPhone. The later two would have to support offline reading, like on a plane.

After googling and getting nothing but old blog spam from 2013 and countless toggling of settings, I have discovered:

1) If Books on macOS or iOS/iPadOS is set to use iCloud Drive, you will not be able to transfer a book on your hard drive to an iDevice. Syncing does not work, dragging and dropping to the Books section on macOS does nothing. The user is left with no error messages or warnings.

2) You cannot see your Books through icloud.com nor iCloud Drive on macOS. The only way to see Books on iCloud is to turn on iCloud for Books on the Mac or iDevice.

3) Dragging a book/PDF from your file system to macOS books when iCloud is turned on for Books will upload the Book/PDF to iCloud. Maybe.

4) Unless you want *all* your books and PDFs to be on iCloud, you need to download everything to your Mac, delete them from Books, and then manually sync. Otherwise, the ridiculously small 5GB iCloud space you’re given will be eaten up real quick.

5) I purchased Neuromancer. Books keeps offering the other two books in the trilogy, and I can’t remove them. I can’t remove them from my macOS or iDevices. My wife bought a series of other books. I can’t remove them from my macOS or iDevices, either. I can’t get rid of this Winnie the Pooh shit, either.

6) You have to go into your account settings to unhide books. There isn’t an easy way to see *all* your purchases from the store. There is no Hide functionality in macOS Books. I’m not sure how to bring them once deleted.

I wish someone could explain to me this paradigm. If it’s just an eBook store, I shouldn’t be able to manage my own PDFs and eBooks with it. Either way, the behavior shouldn’t be completely different when one device is using iCloud.

TL;DR – Apple’s eBook implementation is a complete clusterfuck. Turn off iCloud usage for Books on all your devices and just manage it yourself via the sync function on the device in macOS.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2021 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.