Importing text into Books or Kindle for iOS

I copied the text to an Apple Pages document and it looks really nice actually. Then I exported to e-pub and copied to Apple Books. It looks wonderful in there. Even the links to the running commentary on his works are still usable, so I can tap an asterisk in the text and that takes me to that commentary online. Thanks for all the help!

I can’t remember if I have asked this before. But how do I import PDFs into Apple Books and the Kindle app only using the iPad?

I can open a pdf into Files and then use the share sheet to open in Apple Books. But that only lets me read and annotate the pdf in Books. It doesn’t stay inside of Apple Books as a pdf. Why not?

I can also use the share sheet to “Send to Kindle”, which opens the Kindle app, but nothing happens. There is no pdf in the Kindle app. How do I add PDFs to the Kindle app? Again, only using iOS.

For Books: Open the PDF in Files, and use the share sheet to open it in Books (“Open in Books” will be the only option for Books that you see.)

Once it’s open, tap anywhere in the document to bring up the toolbar. Tap the share button, then “Copy to Books.” That will add it to the library. (And yes, that’s way too many steps for something that should be simple.)

For Kindle: I’m pretty sure the Send to Kindle function in the share sheet is broken. However, you can use the share sheet to send the PDF as an email to your Kindle’s address (which you can find in the “Your Content and Devices” section of your Amazon account). Not only will that get the file to your device, in the process Amazon will convert the file so you can resize text. It may also create a table of contents if the PDF had a properly-formatted one — it’s been a while since I checked, so I’m not certain.

Assuming you’re not committed to the formatting and layout of the original PDF, the conversion’s a pretty nice feature.

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Thanks! How do you best prefer to read long PDFs that you have to make annotatiONS like highlighting to, on the iPad?

I find PDFExpert best for that.

My students submit their written work as a PDF using a Google Form. PDFExpert can sync with Google Drive, so it’s handy for providing feedback. It’s a fantastic annotation tool. (I’m a mix of high tech and old school. I hate paper, but I prefer to hand write when providing feedback on essays.)

For research articles, I’ve been using Zotero with attachments kept in Google Drive so that I can use PDFExpert for annotation. I’m in the process of moving to Bookends, though, for better iOS usability.

Bookends can sync via an iCloud Drive folder, and PDFExpert supports open in place, so I may just continue using that. But Bookends also has built-in annotation capability, so I’ll likely give that a try.

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