[leebase]

Alrighty...so you want to go to iOS5, but you have books in iBooks that you didn't purchase from Apple, and haven't sync'd to iTunes. Books, perhaps loaded from Calibre's web interface or any other source.

Trouble is, if you tell iTunes to sync your books now -- you get the message that it's going to wipe out your books and only put on the ones FROM iTunes. Not good.

However, the work around is easy. Just go into iTunes and under File choose "Transfer purchases from iPad". It will transfer, among other things, the books, even the ones not purchased from the iBookstore...even the ones loaded for free from websites or your local calibre server.

THEN you can sync, backup, and install iOS5.

Cloud services have shown their worth to me in this. No problems with ToDo, Evernote, Instapaper or the Kindle app. You can just sync and get all that content back.

My two big issues were iBooks and Stanza. And I already wrote about getting my Fictionwise (eReader/.pdb) books back.

Lee