Where are my PDFs going in the iPad Books app?

November 10, 2021 2:34 PM

So: I have an iPad and I have scarcely ever used the Books app (I downloaded an audiobook to my phone maybe five years ago). I realized perhaps three months ago that I could use it for PDFs as well. The problem is some of the PDFs are unable to open and seem to have migrated to the cloud and will not come back.

I am currently running what began as a tabletop RPG but in the pandemic era, shifted to a virtual tabletop. It occurred to me that I could dump all sorts of game books and articles and the like onto the tablet for ready reference. I've been doing this, delighting in how I can now browse easily what used to be quite a few linear feet of bookshelf. The PDFs are mostly quite short -- often a page or two of text and well under 1 MB of memory.

Lately, though, the app has become temperamental. A week or so back I updated the iOs (now running 14.8.1) and almost at once the Books app began crashing frequently. I followed some suggestions to reduce the load on the iPad (closing open windows in Safari, etc.) and the crashes problem seems to have stopped, but I noticed today about fifteen percent of my files in Books are no longer accessible. There is a cloud icon at the right side, next to the three dots that open the menu. If I click on one of the inaccessible files, it starts to download, but never gets past the initial start.

There is about 12 GB of the 32 GB memory still empty and available, so I have trouble thinking it is a memory issue. I have never uploaded anything to the cloud. As well, I cannot detect any pattern to what is suddenly inaccessible: large files, small files, things I have recently added, things I added months ago, things I looked at three days ago, things I have never opened since I downloaded them... any suggestions?

posted by ricochet biscuit to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Do you have a Macintosh involved in your iBooks, or is this all being done on the iPad. I remember in the past running into limitations syncing PDFs between my Mac and iPhone in the Books app. I can try to track down the details (it may just not be supported) but if there's no Mac involved than it's not that problem.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 2:57 PM on November 10, 2021

No, these are coming off my Windows laptop. My portable stuff (iPhone, IPad, iPod) is Mac, all the rest is not.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:14 PM on November 10, 2021

Have you synced it with your PC lately? Sometimes files will go missing after a sync. I would check your Files app and also try a regular search for one of the file names and see if it shows it in any other place besides Books.

If you want to use the PDFs in another app and you still have them, I think Documents (from Readdle) is great. It will also let you grab things from your iCloud account, so you can use it test. It has better organization than the Books app.
posted by soelo at 5:35 PM on November 10, 2021

Yeah, I've had that happen too and it's annoying. By default, Books syncs your PDFs to iCloud and deletes the ones it thinks you aren't using. I think I turned this off on my iPad by turning off iCloud Drive in Settings > Books. You might have to load your PDFs onto your iPad again, though.
posted by ectabo at 6:35 PM on November 10, 2021

I tried turning off the iCloud Drive toggle but that makes everything in the library vanish (save for the two audiobooks). Now it seems everything is now in the cloud; at least, all the files now have a cloud icon next to the three menu dots. They all seem to open, though save for one, which has a single full stop dot e my where the others have the cloud. And for what it’s worth, all the cloud icons are dotted outlines. I think they were solid outlines before.

After I toggled them iCloud Drive back on, the first few PDFs crashed in seconds but subsequent openings seem more stable.

I have not synced the iPad since I began loading PDFs onto it last month.

If I try Documents (or Marvin, which another friend recommended), will I have to reload all my PDFs or can I somehow migrate them from Books?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:00 PM on November 10, 2021

If they are really in iCloud, you should be able to get them into Documents easily. I am not sure my PDFs load into Marvin at all. I generally drop tens of files in at a time and usually get one or two that fail to load, which I have always assumed is because they're pdfs and not epubs. Marvin has better organization, but Documents handles more file types.
posted by soelo at 9:10 PM on November 10, 2021

I think turning off the iCloud Drive toggle turns off iCloud integration completely -- so it makes you download all your files again, but once you do that, they'll be locally stored and it won't delete them automatically. Unfortunately, there's no way to turn off just the automatic deletion.
posted by ectabo at 6:36 AM on November 11, 2021

Hmm. Is there any downside to keeping it off permanently?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:43 PM on November 12, 2021

Books uses iCloud to sync your files, bookmarks, current reading location, etc. to other devices, so if you're only using the files on one device and you have backups on your computer, it shouldn't make a difference.
posted by ectabo at 10:08 AM on November 13, 2021

Good to hear.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:55 PM on November 13, 2021