I'm having a whole heap of problems trying to organize my small collection of ebooks. Mostly PDF but a couple of epubs as well none of which came from the iBook store. I'm running Sierra 10.12.6 with iBooks 1.10 and iTunes 12.7.5.9.
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I have a book in iBooks where I have edited the author name from "Alexander Elder" to "Dr. Alexander Elder". This change is reflected in iBooks, but is not reflected iTunes on my Mac. iTunes just shows it as "Alexander Elder". I have already several times deleted all books from my iPad and tried to re-sync them. iTunes still always shows the original incorrect metadata while iBooks shows it correctly.
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iTunes fails to even show nearly half of my library. I have a total of 25 books in iBooks, and only 15 show up in iTunes for syncing.
Why won't so many of my books appear in iTunes? How can I get them to appear again and how can I sync them?
In addition to deleting all my books from my iPad, I have also deleted and re-added them to iBooks, quit & relaunched iTunes and iBooks, and I have tried the "Move Books from iTunes" option in iBooks. The latter did momentarily cause all the books to appear in iTunes, but as soon as I quit & relaunched, it was back to only 15 again.
Nothing has ever solved the Author metadata issue.
I've been searching like crazy and finding loads of people with similar but slightly different problems.
UPDATE: Woah I just discovered something very odd… guessing this is a bug. If in iTunes I go into my iPad and choose Settings > Books, I see only the 15. If however I then click on Photos and back to Books, suddenly they all appear. If I then click On My Device > Books and click back to Settings > Books, it's back to the 15 again. Rinse & repeat. Very very strange!
So with this last discovery I am in fact able to sync all my books, however the author issue remains for the one book, it is incorrect in both iTunes and on my iPad after sync.
Best Answer
I would download Calibre to edit the metadata before adding the file saved by calibre to Books. Also, I've found that unchecking ibooks in system preferences>icloud>icloud drive on my mac fixed the issue with itunes, and I only really read books on my iPad/iPhone, and having Books turned on under icloud on those devices' settings doesn't seem to mess anything up so this works for me.