iBooks for iCloud appears in iOS 9.3 Beta

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by JTravers

[Image violates Posting Guidelines for size - MODERATOR]

Mind attaching the images? Thanks.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mind attaching the images? Thanks.

It would be nice if the mdoerators would do that, but no. They would rather be inhibitive than helpful.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

But yeah, this has always been possible, only now (9.3 and onwards) you will be able to upload books into iCloud and will not have to use iTunes (ick) anymore...

Sorry to belabor the point, but can someone please provide a link to evidence that the beta has this iCloud feature? It is not mentioned on Apple's own description of forthcoming iOS 9.3 features:

http://www.apple.com/ios/preview/

Maybe I am bad at googling but I cannot find this.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

It would be nice if the mdoerators would do that, but no. They would rather be inhibitive than helpful.

I did suggest that moderators moved oversized images as attachments as in most cases, removing them makes the message and/or thread useless. A good example is someone asking what's wrong with his/her Reader. Someone asks to see a screen shot and it's posted and then taken down for being too large before we can see it to tell the person if it's broken screen or not.

Another thing, given that most people have broadband, I do think the image size limit is a bit on the small side.

[mattcurtis]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

What I like the most about this document is how Apple actually assumes that anyone seriously uses iBooks for PDFs

In my experience, plenty of people do.

[shalym]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I did suggest that moderators moved oversized images as attachments as in most cases, removing them makes the message and/or thread useless. A good example is someone asking what's wrong with his/her Reader. Someone asks to see a screen shot and it's posted and then taken down for being too large before we can see it to tell the person if it's broken screen or not.

Another thing, given that most people have broadband, I do think the image size limit is a bit on the small side.

I may be mistaken, but I believe the image size limit is less about file size and more about the actual size of the image. If an image is too large, it distorts the size of all posts after it and forces horizontal scrolling, which is extremely annoying.

I have seen some forums that will automatically resize images that are too large, but I'm not sure how hard that is to implement.

Given that it's much easier to just attach the image than it is to find a place to host it and then insert the link to it, I'm not sure why people continue do that instead of just attaching it.

Shari

[JQW]

iCloud support appears to be broken at the moment. Although I managed to upload a an EPUB file from one device running the 9.3 public beta, the other device running the same was unable to see it. I presume the server side of things has yet to be enabled.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by JQW

iCloud support appears to be broken at the moment. Although I managed to upload a an EPUB file from one device running the 9.3 public beta, the other device running the same was unable to see it. I presume the server side of things has yet to be enabled.

I can't get it to work at all.

[NillaGoon]

Originally Posted by JQW

iCloud support appears to be broken at the moment. Although I managed to upload a an EPUB file from one device running the 9.3 public beta, the other device running the same was unable to see it. I presume the server side of things has yet to be enabled.

It's actually working almost correctly for me. iBooks on the OS X beta uploaded its whole inventory to iCloud automatically (once I enabled iCloud for iBooks), and my mobile devices see all the iCloud books.

The only thing that's not working for me is clicking on a book cover on iPad to actually download the book. The book highlights as if it's going to start downloading, but nothing happens past that point. On the other hand, it seems to work perfectly on iPhone.

For those interested in trying this out: If you have a Mac, I'm not sure if you have to be on the OS X beta as well, but it's probably a good idea. Assuming that you've been syncing to mobile devices from OS X iBooks in the past, it's probably best to start by running iBooks on OS X, enabling iCloud for iBooks there, and letting it finish creating the iCloud book repository before trying it on mobile. You can run the top command in a Terminal window to see the upload activity - iBooks itself doesn't give any indication that this process is going on.

For me, the main benefit of iCloud syncing is that you can see and manage all your books on iPad without having them take up storage space. Just download the ones you're actively reading.

By default, iOS iBooks will leave any downloaded books on the device. To reclaim the space, you have to do a Select All and then Delete -> This Copy. That will leave you with books that have a cloud icon superimposed that don't consume any actual space. (But keep in mind, the downloads aren't working for me on iPad, so YMMV.)

Another thing I've discovered is that you can continue to use iTunes to sync books. You don't have to choose between iTunes and iCloud. Syncing through iTunes has the same effect as downloading through iCloud, so it's my workaround for still being able to use iBooks on iPad while problems get worked on.

[zebradude]

Is this only for books purchased from Apple or non DRMed EPUBS you have in your iTunes library?

I am hoping that I can upload my non apple books to the cloud as well.

UPDATE: I was able to upload a non DRMed EPUB book to my icloud BUT unable to download to connected device.

[pwalker8]

It will be interesting to see what the final version looks like and how it works.

[JTravers]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Mind attaching the images? Thanks.

It wasn't my image, so I linked to it. I'll post a link to the tweet, so if this violates posting guidelines people can at least see the original that way.

[Image violates Posting Guidelines for size - MODERATOR]

[zebradude]

Originally Posted by JQW

iCloud support appears to be broken at the moment. Although I managed to upload a an EPUB file from one device running the 9.3 public beta, the other device running the same was unable to see it. I presume the server side of things has yet to be enabled.

I happen to have two Macs on OS X El CAPITAN (10.11.4) and iCloud works between the 2 macs so far!

I OS 9.3 BETA no luck!

hmmm...

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by kyteflyer

I'm about as interested in this, as I was for the music things and photo things. All I see is that its a way for Apple to make you realise you need more storage. And buy it from them. Nope.

The photos part of iCloud is great. I'm a keen photographer, and have all my pictures in iCloud, so they automatically appear on my iPhone and iPad. You can store an awful lot of photos in the 20GB (or whatever it is) of free storage that Apple give you. Way better than uploading photos to individual devices (although I do, of course, have them backed up on multiple local drives, too!).

[David Munch]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The photos part of iCloud is great. I'm a keen photographer, and have all my pictures in iCloud, so they automatically appear on my iPhone and iPad. You can store an awful lot of photos in the 20GB (or whatever it is) of free storage that Apple give you.

5GB. Which isn't a lot by todays standards.