I lost the highlighting option in iBooks

[Msddivers]

I don't know what I did but I lost the highlighting option in iBooks. I don't have the aA on the top right corner anymore. I always keep my iPad up to date and I have not used my iBooks in a few months. Can iBooks be reset to default?

 

[scifan57]

I just checked on my iPad, which is on iOS 9.1 and it's missing for me as well. If this is a result of an update of the iBooks app, there's no way to get the old version back since it's one of the stock apps built into iOS.

 

[scifan57]

I did some checking with another book and the highlighting option is still there. The book I first checked had the feature disabled. Here's several screenshots from one of my iPad user guides. As you can see, the aA is still in the upper right. To enable the highlight function tap on a word until the highlight pop up appears. You can then expand the selected lines and tap highlight. Once highlighted, you can select one of several colours or the trash bin to delete the highlight.

 

[Msddivers]

I just checked on my iPad, which is on iOS 9.1 and it's missing for me as well. If this is a result of an update of the iBooks app, there's no way to get the old version back since it's one of the stock apps built into iOS.

Sorry for the delay in responding. You are right, some documents I can highlight and others not. I tried Adobe Acrobat Reader and found that so far, I can highlight all my document. I might be wrong but I thought I could highlight everything with iBooks before. Oh well, that's life.

Thanks for the tutorial

 

[twerppoet]

You can only highlight in ePub and iBooks Author (textbook format) files. These are the standard formats for the iBooks Store. PDF files have no highlighting or other annotation features. The most you can do is bookmark the page.

As you've discovered, if you want to annotate PDF files you need to use a third party app.

PDF files have a different layout, controls, and a default category/collection in iBooks. This is especially obvious in landscape view. If there was ever a way to highlight PDF files in iBooks, I don't remember it.