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anp27

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 17, 2011
220
26
Brooklyn, NY
I thought by placing my PDFs in my iBooks library, I would be able to read them within iBooks itself..nope. They still open up in Preview. Why???
 

chabig

macrumors G4
Sep 6, 2002
11,450
9,321
That's just how PDFs work. iBooks itself is not a pdf reader. It can organize your pdf "books" but Preview is still the reader.
 

anp27

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jan 17, 2011
220
26
Brooklyn, NY
That's just how PDFs work. iBooks itself is not a pdf reader. It can organize your pdf "books" but Preview is still the reader.

I want to read my PDFs in iBooks.. I can organize PDFs well on my own, don't need iBooks for that!

Hopefully Apple will improve upon this in future updates.
 

GrindedDown

macrumors 6502a
Jun 4, 2009
718
270
Las Vegas
I am discovering how aggravating this is right now honestly. I do a lot of cross device reading and so on both my iphone and my ipad, i use ibooks for reading my pdfs, which is great because of the ability to sync up bookmarks and what page i am currently on.

I have been completely unable to find an answer as to why ibooks for mac doesn't offer this functionality as well. I really would like to be able to read pdfs natively in ibooks on mac for better cross device support.

Anyone know if this is possible and I am just completely missing something?
 

Naio

Cancelled
Apr 2, 2015
75
11
I am discovering how aggravating this is right now honestly. I do a lot of cross device reading and so on both my iphone and my ipad, i use ibooks for reading my pdfs, which is great because of the ability to sync up bookmarks and what page i am currently on.

I have been completely unable to find an answer as to why ibooks for mac doesn't offer this functionality as well. I really would like to be able to read pdfs natively in ibooks on mac for better cross device support.

Anyone know if this is possible and I am just completely missing something?

I don't use iBooks myself and I know this is not the answer you're looking for, but have you considered converting your .PDFs to ePUB so that you can read them in iBooks?
 

GrindedDown

macrumors 6502a
Jun 4, 2009
718
270
Las Vegas
I don't use iBooks myself and I know this is not the answer you're looking for, but have you considered converting your .PDFs to ePUB so that you can read them in iBooks?

Yeah I have been trying to do that using calibre. The problem I have found is that i have been reading a lot of coding and algorithm design books lately, which either have a lot of non standard characters or because of the tables and the equations that are used in the text, the formatting comes out very screwed up. So I gave up trying cause I was spending too much time and have resorted to reading PDFs for now.

I have however successfully converted some books as well.

Any suggestions for maybe alternate software (OSX) or settings for use in Calibre that may help? fwiw, i spent a lot of time changing settings and creating numerous versions to no avail with some books.
 

Naio

Cancelled
Apr 2, 2015
75
11
Any suggestions for maybe alternate software (OSX) or settings for use in Calibre that may help? fwiw, i spent a lot of time changing settings and creating numerous versions to no avail with some books.

Sorry. :(
 

GrindedDown

macrumors 6502a
Jun 4, 2009
718
270
Las Vegas

It's all good. I went ahead and sent feedback to Apple support in regards to the matter. I figured it couldn't hurt.

I suppose with all of these retina macs that are now in their lineup, people are probably going to be spending more time reading on their macs and hopefully they'll add in better cross device support in the future.
 
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