ICloud – How to sync Reading List with Windows

As far as I know, there’s no way to do it directly through the GUI, but there is a file you can edit quite easily. The file ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist contains all of the Safari bookmarks, including those saved to the Reading List. (For whatever reason, this file gets borked in TextMate, among others, but TextWrangler seems to cope just fine).

Anything beginning <key>ReadingList</key> is an item saved to the Reading List. There are two entries that control the title and the description. The first will be of the form:

<key>PreviewText</key>
<string>No preview available</key>

This occurs about six or seven lines in. Change this, and the description changes. The second entry is of the form:

<key>title</key>
<string>http://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.1763/arxiv.org</string>

and you can imagine what that does.

This procedure worked for me in Safari 5.1.1 in 10.7.2; I presume it should similarly work for you.

Two caveats: I have no idea what this might do to an iCloud-synced reading list. If the edit doesn’t get marked with the appropriate edit date, there could be some weird sync conflict brouhaha and Safari might explode. Also, I quit Safari while I messed around in Bookmarks.plist. No idea what might happen if you leave it open; probably nothing. But y’know. You can’t be too careful.

This is an example full entry for a Reading List item in Bookmarks.plist.

<dict>
    <key>ReadingList</key>
    <dict>
        <key>DateAdded</key>
        <date>2012-11-29T23:30:55Z</date>
        <key>DateLastFetched</key>
        <date>2012-11-29T23:30:55Z</date>
        <key>PreviewText</key>
        <string> **This is the short description** </string>
    </dict>
    <key>Sync</key>
    <dict>
        <key>Key</key>
        <string>”C=1234567890"</string>
        <key>ServerID</key>
        <string>https://example@example.com+ABCDEFG12345</string>
    </dict>
    <key>URIDictionary</key>
    <dict>
        <key>title</key>
        <string> **A web page that I’ve saved** </string>
    </dict>
    <key>URLString</key>
    <string>http://www.example.com/readinglist</string>
    <key>WebBookmarkType</key>
    <string>WebBookmarkTypeLeaf</string>
    <key>WebBookmarkUUID</key>
    <string> 1234567890 </string>
</dict>

Sometimes this can be caused by temporary issues with your account or the connection to the iCloud servers. Waiting it out isn't a bad strategy if you don't want to go for official support or when restarting the affected devices is not effective at clearing up the issue.

For ongoing issues, you might reach out to iCloud support to ensure it's not an issue with your setup or account.