My quandary…

I’ve been saving various documents, magazines and other publications, mainly PDFs, to iBooks on both my iPad and iPhone over the years.  This is fine if you want to read them on the device or backup and restore to a new device.

But what if you want to get rid of your iPad for example and you have 168 PDFs that you want to transfer to your PC?

It might surprise you but iTunes does not have this functionality.

What are your choices?

  1. You can use iBooks to export the books as an email, one at a time, with numeric and unrelated filenames.  Really? How time consuming is that!
  2. You can scour the internet, like I did, looking for a simpler solution.  There are quite a few such as: Imazing, EaseUS, Apowersoft and more. At least one I found was flagged up by ESET as a site containing malicious content. Almost all had very limited demo functionality and you would need to spend £20 to £40 to find out if they worked.
  3. I came across iExplorer which also has a demo mode…but the limited functionality didn’t include iBooks.  I was able to transfer ALL my PDFs off my iPad (and iPhone) to a folder on my PC…and all with the correct filenames.

iExplorer does many other things and is classed as an iPhone Manager…you can back up, restore and access pretty much anything to do with your iPhone or iPad.

You can find the website at https://macroplant.com/iexplorer

I’m not affiliated to the product and don’t get any form of commission…I just think it’s a really useful piece of software. A full license starts at $40 for one PC.