To save your document as a .PDF, you can either email it to yourself, or you can send it to iTunes. Click on Share a Print, then choose send to iTunes, followed by PDF. To get it into iBooks, we need to first send it to iTunes. There is no option to immediately send it to iBooks, but it definitely seems like there should be.
The PDF document doesn’t even show up in iTunes on your iPad as is. Yet, if you sync to your PC or Mac, you will see that it is stored in your books in iTunes, along with any other PDFs, audio books, or e-books you have in your collection. I only have a few, as I prefer to read books on the Kindle app, rather than iBooks.
If you find your device in iTunes, then click on the Books tab, you’ll see all the e-books and PDFs stored in iTunes. It allows you to check off the things you want on your iPad. It’s very manageable.
Once you’ve checked off the items you want to appear in iBooks on your iPad, whether they be e-books or PDFs, click apply, and iTunes updates your iPad, deleting the items you no longer want, and adds the new items.
Going back to the iPad, open the iBooks app, and you’ll see all the books that you checked off from iTunes. All of them are there. You can also add e-books at this point by going to the store within the app and buying new books. Again, I prefer the Kindle app for this.
Yet, it was the PDFs I was looking for. Once I view the PDFs in iBooks I find the testing document finally added to iBooks. Hopefully Apple will make some changes to this process at some point. It’s not a laborious process, but it does seem to take some extra steps that shouldn’t be unnecessary. The process shouldn’t have to involve going back to your Mac or PC.
