How Do I Remove All Books or PDFs From iTunes?

Comments: 2 Responses to “How Do I Remove All Books or PDFs From iTunes?”

Gary Rosenzweig

7 years ago

I've never added books to iTunes. Where are these PDFs in iTunes? iTunes handles music, videos, podcasts, etc, but PDFs? The only PDFs I can think of that I have ever had in iTunes are maybe supplements to special music albums. Do you have PDFs in your Music library?
I tried adding a PDF to my music library and it appeared just like that supplemental material to albums. When I Control+clicked on it and selected Show In Finder, it revealed a location deep inside my iTunes library. But I suppose if I had my preferences set differently in iTunes it would have linked to the original PDF instead of importing it.
iTunes and iBooks have separate libraries completely, so I suspect that your PDFs in each one are separate. Try removing one to see what happens. These are the sorts of experiments I do to figure things out of help people -- but it is best for you to do it since my import settings and other preferences would be different. In fact, I'm using iCloud with iBooks, so all of my books are synced across devices.
Maybe in iTunes do Control+Click, choose Show in Finder and then duplicate the file as a backup before you try it if you can't find a single PDF that you can risk in an experiment.
I suspect that the copies are separate ones. But you may also be prompted as to what to do: whether to delete the file or not.

Bente

7 years ago

Thanks for this. I tested, and I see that when I sync my iPad with iTunes, that all the PDFs I have added to iBooks appears in iTunes, BUT only in the section 'on my device'. So, when I deleted a PDF from here, it disappeared from my iPad.
So, the PDFs are not actually in iTunes. Clearer now.