How to transfer fanfic from one iPhone to another using iBooks

[joan_waterhouse]

I've recently got a new iPhone and when I wanted to transfer my fanfics it didn't seem immediately obvious to me how to do it. I've now figured it out and posted about it on tumblr, but I thought maybe somebody here finds it useful as well:

iBooks is not an ideal situation but if like me you’ve already been reading fanfic in iBooks for years and have hundreds of fics with notes and everything, switching to a new reader is even more of a hassle.

The good news: If you’ve set up your new iPhone by restoring from a backup of your old one (where all your fic notes were) your notes will be transferred. But your books aren’t (necessarily).

The bad inconvenient news: To get your books on your new phone you also have to have them in iBooks on your Mac, which I hadn’t cause that’s not where I wanted to read them so it never occurred to me. (I have no idea how/if this works if you’re using another operating system.)
So here’s what iBooks wants you to do:

1. Open iBooks and simpy drag and drop all your ebook files into it.
2. Go to “File” > “Move books from iTunes…”. This will actually move everything in your iBooks library over to iTunes. [Yes, this sounds like the opposite of what it’s doing! I figured this out because of a long discussion in an Apple forum from 3 years ago… So, you know: Usability! Customer feedback! /s]
3. Plug your new phone into your Mac and open iTunes.
4. In iTunes click the tiny phone symbol to open information about the contents of your phone.
5. There will be a menu on the sidebar showing you two entries for Books: first Settings under that On My Device. You want to click on the first one, unter Settings.
6. There, you chose “Synch Books” and then either “All books” or just “Selected books” (and select the books you want, if you choose the latter).
7. Apply your changes and voila all the books are on your new phone again, and all your notes will be there too! (If you’ve restored the phone from a backup of a phone that also had the notes!)

This will be done in no time, if you get all your fic from AO3 and definitely already have an ebook file on your computer for each and every fic you’ve read on your phone. And if you really just want all your fic on your phone.



Which leads me to the part where this is actually a PAIN that took me hours!

Because reality isn’t usually as clean-cut as a simple how-to wants it to be.

So why did this take me so long?

A) I only wanted to transfer those books you also had on my old phone (I have many more saved on my computer): Apparently there is no easy way to tell iTunes to “select just those books that are on phone A and put them on phone B”. So what I did is I had my old phone open in front of me, searched for every single one of the fics I found on there (in step 6 above) and selected every. single. one. of the  268 books by hand… (Silver lining: iTunes will recognise if you had this book on a certain bookshelf on your old phone and will put it there again on the new one. So at least I don’t have an unrecognisable mix of fandoms and pairings.)

Which leads me to B) and C) (which aren’t strictly iBooks’ fault).

B) Apparently I hadn’t saved all the fics I had on my old phone on my computer as well. So I spent a good amount of time on AO3 downloading at least 50 or more (and noticing that one of my fav authors recently deleted all their fic! D:). Don’t forget to go through steps 1 and 2 again so that newly added books show up in iTunes!

And C) editing bibliographic information for books that don’t come from AO3. Over the years I’ve made epub files of fics which have only been published to LJ (for my own use only!) and I somehow fucked up not properly filling in Title and Author fields, which means these look like unnamed books to iBooks and the relevant info is only in the content of the book itself. This in turn means, that even though the book is there, you won’t find it in iTunes unless you edit the bibliographic information in iBooks first.

Let me just say. GHARGH!!! It is possible but iBooks is such a shit application for that. You can do it if you switch to list view and click on the field you want to edit.

TIP: Make sure you sort by “last read”! Because whenever you sort by something else, iBooks will re-sort the list as soon as you enter a new title or author and you will end up entering the information into the wrong item at least some of the time!

General Limitations of iBooks:

• You cannot open an Info box the way you can for songs in iTunes. Which makes cataloguing a pain.
• iBooks (on the Mac) doesn’t tell me how many books I have total or in each category! Like, what the hell? Why?
• I cannot export anything to a spreadsheet (I just want the bibliographic info, I’m not trying to “steal” the books I’ve bought FFS!!). Which means that every bit of cataloguing I do for my fanfic in iBooks locks me into a shitty system that I nonetheless (seem to) depend upon (for now).