IBooks on Windows Archives

At some point you may find yourself with a PDF on your computer that you want to move to your iPhone or iPad so you can take it with you to read. iBooks is the preferred reader in Apple’s ecosystem, so you probably want to save it there. There are a couple ways to transfer a PDF from a Mac to your iPhone, and it is also possible to do it from a PC as well. Here’s how:

From a Mac (AirDrop)

1. The easiest way to get a PDF from your Mac to your iBooks app on your iPhone or iPad is to simply AirDrop it. To do this, first make sure your iPhone/iPad is set to accept AirDrops from everyone.
2. Next, right-click on the PDF you want to send, then select Share -> AirDrop.

3. Now a window will pop up listing potential AirDrop recipients, click on your iPhone to send it there.

4. When it sends, your iPhone/iPad will ask you what app you want to store it in. Select iBooks (or another if you wish) to store the PDF there. Open up iBooks and you will see it under "My Books."

From a Mac (iBooks)

1. If you use iBooks on your Mac and have it synching with iCloud, this method is just as easy as the previous. Simply open up iBooks and drag the PDF into your library.

2. Open iBooks on your iPhone/iPad and you will see the PDF. Tap the cloud icon to download it.

From a PC

1. If you are using a PC you can simply email the PDF to yourself (this obviously will work from a Mac as well). The problem with this method is that your PDF may be too large to send.
2. Open the email with the PDF and tap on it to download it. Once it downloads and opens, long press on it to bring up the share menu, then tap on "Copy to iBooks."

iBooks stands for the Apple eBooks or eBook reader. Referring to the iBooks reader, it is the official integrated app for users to buy and read Apple eBooks, but until recently it is still only available for IOS 8.4 and Mac OSX 10.10 Yosemite or higher versions, this means only the Apple users with iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch or Mac computer can get access to the iBooks literally. Compared to the narrow screen IOS devices, many users prefer to read on bigger screen devices like Mac and Windows computers. It is notably comfortable to read iBooks on desktop for its high clarity and resolution screen, but you may not use Mac computers all the time, so what can you do if you want to read iBooks such as the ePub files on a Windows desktop? Generally speaking, you just need to transfer iBooks to your PC and find an alternative reader.

How to transfer iBooks to Windows Computers

There are many ways to transfer iBooks to Windows PC, following are the top three ones:

Transfer iBooks from Mac computer. For the iBooks which are already downloaded through iBooks app on a Mac computer, it is pretty easy to transfer. You can plug in an USB flash drive, then copy the iBooks from the Mac computer to the flash drive by simple drag & drop from iBooks app, after that you can do it in the similar way to copy the files from the flash drive to your Windows desktop.

Transfer iBooks from IOS devices. If you have already purchased and downloaded iBooks from the iPhone/iPad/iPod touch, you can directly connect your IOS device to the iTunes to sync the files to your Windows. It is not difficult at all. After connecting your IOS device to the iTunes like iPhone, you will see the devices tab menu from the right side of the iTunes. Please click menu 'File' -> 'Devices' -> 'Transfer Purchases from Administrator's iPhone' to transfer the iBooks to your Windows desktop. Or alternatively you can use a free IOS transferring tool called iTools which is more flexible to transfer the contents.

Download iBooks by iTunes for Windows. What you need to do is to launch the iTunes on your Windows computer, then login with the iTunes account from which you have already purchased the iBooks and click 'Account'-> 'Purchased' to open the purchased content list, next you can go to 'Books' tab and pick up the iBooks you want to download. In this way, you don't need to connect any external devices but please make sure you have a good internet speed. Else it might take a long time to download.

How to Read DRM Free iBooks on PCs

As Apple doesn't have the official iBook reader for Windows, so you need to find other software. There are many kinds of iBooks files with different extensions like ePub and iBook etc. Take the ePub books for example, if you want to read ePub books on Windows, you can use eBook reader apps or plugins.

Adobe Digital Editions. Concerning the eBook software, the first one I will recommend is Adobe Digital Editions. It has the important features such as bookmarking, highlights & notes etc., making it simpler to enjoy eBooks. It Supports multiple formats including ePub, ePub3, PDF and so on. You can download it from the Adobe website for free and install it to your computer, then drag an ePub file to its main screen to start open an ePub file with ease. Besides this, you may use tools like Kobo, Nook, Kindle etc., the process is more or less the same.

Firefox with EPEBReader plugin. If you don't want to get extra software on your computers, you can also try to use your browser with eBook reader plugin like EPEBReader for Firefox, MagicScroll eBook Reader for Chrome etc. For instance, you can launch the firebox, then go to a search engine website like Google and search 'EPUBReader', you will find the plugin which usually shows as the first item. Then open it and click 'Add to Firefox' button. Finally, you can drag ePub files to the firebox to open and read. Likewise, you can do it in the similar way if you prefer the Chrome browser.

Additionally, if you get other formats of iBooks or you just prefer to read iBooks in other eBook reader, you may use a free eBook converter Calibre to help you convert iBooks to other formats of files. But please keep in mind that not all kinds of iBooks can be converted/read on Windows. For the Apple specific files with iBook extension, currently there is few third party software support it.

Tips about the DRM Protected iBooks

Above are the common ways to read iBooks on Windows. However, these methods only work for the standard DRM free files, not FairPlay DRM protected iBooks. For the iBooks which are DRM protected, you have to get rid of the DRM copy right protection first before you can read them on Windows. To check if your iBooks are DRM protected, you can right click on the book on iTunes and choose 'Get Info', after that go to the 'File' tab. If it shows the file kind as 'Protected book', then it is embedded with Digital Rights Management protection, which can only be opened from iBooks app currently.

Despite this, there are many kinds of DRM removal software such as Requiem or TunesKit iBook Copy for Mac can help. Requiem was used to be a great DRM removal freeware, but it was discounted in 2012 and the latest version only supports OSX 10.7 and iTunes 9 or lower versions. It is OK to use it on the old Mac computers. If you don't have such versions and want to downgrade OSX and iTunes, personally I don't think it is worthy spending such a long time to use it though Requiem is a totally free software. Instead you may use a tip-top software TunesKit iBook Copy for Mac to bypass all the DRM protection from your purchased iBooks to extract new DRM free books. It takes only three steps to do that, just add the iBook files, customize the output folder and then click 'Convert' to output the new iBook files. Fore more detailed tutorial, please see: Complete Guide to Remove DRM from iBooks.

In conclusion, reading iBooks on computers is a better experience when you are home or office, we highly recommend iBooks fans who use Windows computers often to try to transfer and read iBooks on their Windows computers. It takes only a little effort to accomplish the goal easily.

Adam Gorden is an experienced writer of TunesKit who is obsessed about tech, movie and software.

I do some serious PDF hoarding in the iBooks app on my iPhone. Calendars, e-books, flyers, things I loved reading and want to read again, things I want to love reading someday in the future... it's all there in a flurry of mismatched PDF previews. It would be pretty sad to lose all my PDFs from iBooks, so today's blog post is about how to backup PDFs from iBooks.

Back in the day (circa 2014), PDF files saved to iBooks were part of a normal iPhone backup, but that is no longer the case. Since PDF files can now be synced to iBooks on your iOS device, they're now categorized as "synced stuff" and "synced stuff" doesn't get backed up. (If that is an interesting sentence to you, you may enjoy this post about iTunes sync vs iTunes backup.) Let me make sure I state this clearly: PDFs in iBooks are NOT backed up as part of an iPhone backup in iTunes. If you don't believe me, here's a reference :).

How to Back Up iBooks PDFs

1. Plug your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch in to your computer.
2. Open iTunes.
3. Open the "File" menu, select Devices -> Transfer Purchases from Your iPhone's Name.

How to Verify the iBooks are Saved on Your Computer

1. Click on the iPhone icon in the upper left corner of iTunes to look at the device specific info.
2. Click on "Books" in the left panel under "Settings".
3. See if all of your PDFs are now in that "Books" section.

A few notes:

• If you're using iTunes on Windows, and can't find the File menu, try pressing Ctrl+B on your keyboard to un-hide it. (The menu is no longer hidden on iTunes 12.4 and higher.)

• If you're on Mac, you may need to open the iBooks app on your Mac once and login there. I needed to do this back in 2015, but I haven't gotten a new computer and needed to repeat the experiment again yet.

• A few people told me that the PDFs didn't transfer until doing a second transfer purchases. So definitely verify the PDFs copied, and if not, try try again.

• If you use iBooks with iCloud drive, the PDFs that are stored in iCloud drive do not transfer to your computer. We've also seen some reports (see the comments below) that the PDFs in iCloud drive may be mislabled in your iBooks app, showing they're not stored in iCloud Drive, when they really are. Update June 29, 2017 see the section below about accessing the PDFs downloaded from iCloud on macOS Sierra and higher.

Where are My iBooks PDFs Stored on my Computer?

On Windows, the iBooks PDF files copied to your iTunes by doing Transfer Purchases are stored in your computer user's account folder, alongside your iTunes music. Here's how to find your iBooks PDFs on your Windows computer:

• Go into your user account's Music folder. (On Windows 10, this would show up under This PC -> Music.)
• Open the folders iTunes -> iTunes Media -> Books.
• You should see your PDFs in this folder.

On Mac, the iBooks PDFs copied by doing Transfer Purchases are tucked away in data for the iBooks Mac App. Here's how to find your iBooks PDFs on your Mac:

• Open Finder, and select the "Go" menu at the top of the screen. Hold the Option key (or Shift + Option on latest Sierra builds), and select the "Library" menu option from the Go menu. (On OSX Lion and above, Library will only appear with the Option key held.)
• From Library, navigate to Containers -> com.apple.BKAgentService -> Data -> Documents -> iBooks -> Books.
• You should see your PDFs in this folder.

iBooks PDFs Stored on iCloud Drive

On macOS Sierra and higher, if you've signed into the macOS iBooks app, your PDFs are actually available through the iCloud Drive section of your "Mobile Documents" folder. (It's likely already there before you ever open the iBooks app, as long as you've signed in to your iCloud account on your Mac.)

First, we need to make sure you've got iBooks turned on for your iCloud drive documents on your Mac.

1. From the Apple menu at the top of the screen, select System Preferences.
2. Select iCloud in System Preferences.
3. Next to iCloud Drive, press the "Options..." button.
4. Ensure the iBooks checkbox is checked.

Now, the iCloud Drive container for iBooks doesn't normally show up in Finder, so we have to manually open it in Finder using Terminal.

1. In the Spotlight search in the upper right corner of the screen, type terminal and press enter to open the Terminal app.
2. In the resulting boring prompt that opens, copy and paste in this bit of text and press return/enter:
   
   
3. A Finder window should pop open with your iBooks pdfs, some of which may have a cloud download icon by them. This indicates that the file itself hasn't been downloaded from iCloud yet. You can click on the cloud download icon to download the PDF. If there are multiple PDFs you want to download, hold the Command key and select the not-downloaded files; then right click on one of the selected files and select "Download".
4. Don't mess too much with the contents of this iCloud Drive container; that seems unwise. If you want copies of your PDFs to muck around with, copy and paste them elsewhere on your computer in Finder.