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Transfer side loaded books from iPad 2 to iPad mini

Cranfordrd

iPF Noob
I have a iPad 2 and will be purchasing a iPad mini retina. I have 100s of side loaded books ( NOT purchased via iBooks). I do not have a Mac. Is there away to transfer these books to the mini or do I lose all my books? I'm giving the old iPad to my mom and will wipe it clean before giving it to her.
 
Where, besides the iPad 2 are they stored now?

I use a Windows based program named Calibre to manipulate book files on my PC. Once nice feature is you can access the PC book library via wireless and a URL.

Another option might be Google Drive or similar web based stored, file movement application.
 
They are only on the iPad, I've been researching and it seems that there is no way to get these drm free ebooks off the ipad?!
 
When you say they are "on the iPad" what does that mean? Are they in iBooks? You don't sync with any computer at all? If they are in iBooks, at worse, you can email them to yourself. You can try a backup of your iPad 2 and hope they come across in the restore to your mini, but I have had problems with that. Made sure you don't get rid of the iPad 2 or give it away until to get the PDFs off. I think if you were syncing to a computer using iTunes, you could copy them to your computer and then move them to the mini. There are still some good reasons to sync to a computer even though they are going away.

In the future, if you are going side load, use something other than iBooks. Or side load to a folder on a computer also as a backup. iBooks is a bit problematic, IMO, to get PDFs out of .
 
Have a look for a program called iTools. It will allow you copy any content from your iPad to any computer, which you can then copy into the new one.
 
They are epubs in iBooks. Books not purchased in the iBook store do not appear in iTunes when backed up. Apparently only books purchased in the store will transfer. Had I known this I would never have started using iBooks back when! I understand now why people hate Apples closed system. I can't keep the old iPad so I really need to figure this out or just give up my my library!

I will definitely look into iTools!!! Thanks all!
 
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Do you have a link to iTools? It's not in the App Store and googling didn't turn up anything that looked like what you mentioned.
 
How can I email a book contained in iBooks? That would certainly be a solution but I dint see a method to do that.

Hi Cranfordrd, you can email the book in iBooks as follows, after tapping on the book of your choice in the library:
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Regards, Andrew


Sent from Oz using Tapatalk
 
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The method you outlined above (Thankyou!) only emails info
About the book, not the actual book.

Perhaps you didn't do it correctly. I have emailed zillions of PDFs to myself. I have not done epubs, BTW, since I have none of those.
 
Epubs can't be mailed.
iTools seems to be software, it can't be found in App Store.
 
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Not true. I email epub files to myself all the time.
Sorry, I should have explained better what I meant:

I've tried different epub ebooks and email accounts, to send them to myself from iBooks. All I get is something like "Check out this book", then the title of the book and the author. I think that's what Cranfordrd is experiencing too.

I can get them into the iBooks app. What I can't do is email them to myself from there.
 
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Have you tried this:

Connect the iPad with the books on it to iTunes. Then, on the iPad tab, right click and select "transfer purchases." This should put the books on/in iTunes. You can check this by going to the Books tab and seeing they are there. For example, in this picture, I just put the first four books into iTunes from my iPad:

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I had gotten those four books by downloading them out of my Calibre account in Dropbox; they are DRM-free and had nothing to do with iTunes, ever, until just now.

Then, eject the iPad and connect the new one. Navigate to the iPad's Books tab and check the "Sync Books" option at the top. Then under Books, you should see all the books that were transferred over from the other device. Put a check mark in the ones you want and then press the Apply button at the bottom right. The books will move over to the new device.

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At least, this worked for me when I transferred those four books from my iPad over to my iPhone.

From what I can tell - and this is the key point - once you have transferred the books to iTunes, they are there until you choose to delete them from iTunes, so, it won't matter if you have them on your device(s) or not. Then, When you want them on a device, it's a matter of checking and syncing them over.

Now, when/if you restore or backup, these books may not be put back on. However, they will still be in iTunes so you can sync them back over. I do recommend you do the transferring and syncing before wiping the first iPad, just to make sure. I don't think anything can/will go wrong, but you never know...

Hope this helps.

Marilyn
 

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