Uploading PDF docs to iPhone without emailing them to yourself
I just upgraded to iOS 4 on my iPhone 3G and was happy to find the iBooks application on my iPhone, less because I thought myself likely to be buying lots of ebooks, but more because I've wanted an easy way to carry around PDF documents on my phone. However, the only way I could figure to upload the files to iBooks was to email them to myself, open up the documents in Mail and then transfer them to iBooks from the Mail app. Clearly, this isn't an ideal solution - I sought to find a better one.
The first thing I tried was to connect my phone to my computer and seeing if I could do something easily through iTunes. Once synced, I clicked the little dropdown for my phone on the iTunes sidebar and then clicked on books
I spent some time on google trying to figure out if there was some easy way to do what I was looking for. I could find just about next to nothing other than to use some other third party PDF viewing program.
Finally, I tried messing around a bit more and found that if instead of going to Books I went to Purchased I could drag PDF files into that list. Once I synced the phone, the PDFs found themselves nicely on my bookshelf.
I'm wondering why the more intuitive process of dragging into the books folder isn't supported. In any case, I'm easily able to do what I want and happy enough with that.
One quick note though to those who want to do the same thing I did - you have to make sure the files have a .pdf extension. I found that they won't load into the Purchased folder if you don't.
Happy iPhone PDFing.
Update (07/27/2010)
As pointed out in the comments below, you can also drag into the Library section within your iTunes sidebar. I'm not sure if this is a feature update or if, as the the commenter suggests, this is only possible once you already have uploaded PDFs into your library. Any feedback on this in the comments would be greatly appreciated.
