Open Radar

 
I’ve been trying out the new “iCloud for iBooks” feature in iOS 9.3. It has overall behaved itself pretty well for a beta, except for the fact that I can’t actually download books from iCloud.

To set up, I ran iBooks on both my iPad and OS X and answered “yes” to the “do you want to use iCloud for iBooks” prompt. The OS X side seemed to be actively uploading, so I let it run overnight. In the morning it was quiescent.

That left me with books taking up iCloud space both as part of the iPad backup and as a separate cache in iCloud, so on the iPad I did (essentially) Select All and then Delete This Copy. The backup size went down and the book covers were marked with the cloud-and-arrow iCloud icon.

The problem now is that tapping on a book to download it now does nothing other than highlight (darken) the cover image in iOS iBooks. The downloading progress bar never appears and the book never actually becomes readable. It just stays highlighted indefinitely. The odd thing is that if I add or remove books in the OS X iBooks library, those changes are properly reflected in the iOS iBooks app. So there is some active connectivity through iCloud, it’s apparently just not quite working right. Even the covers of new books display correctly; they just can’t be downloaded.

Rebooting both machines, restarting iBooks, etc. all do nothing. I’m attaching iCloud logs from the iOS device: The initial tap on the test book (Information Doesn’t Want to be Free by Cory Doctorow) happens at 5:39pm on 1/13/16. I also monitored for console messages while reproducing the problem a couple of times, but didn’t see anything iBooks- or iCloud-related.

As it says, this is currently reproducible at will, so let me know if you would like other logs.