Learn how to remove books, PDFs, and audiobooks from the iPhone or iPad Books app to free local space and clean up your library.
While a typical book found on the Books Store is about two megabytes in size, a textbook with enhanced features like audio and video will typically require anywhere between a few hundred megabytes to up to two gigabytes of storage per textbook.
Now, if you’re anything like me, your devices are stuffed to the gills with multimedia-rich smart reads. So, here’s how to identify the amount of on-device storage consumed by Books (earlier iBooks) and remove them.
How big is my Apple Books offline library?
Go to iOS Settings > General > iPhone or iPad Storage, and scroll down until you find Books. Next to it, you’ll see the total space this app is taking. If you tap Books, you can see the size of the Books app and its documents and data size.
Note that, unlike movies, TV shows, and music, books can’t be removed from this screen of the Settings app.
About PDFs and books in the Apple Books app
You can:
- Download books from the Apple Books Store, which is available inside the Books app.
- Manually add books in the EPUB format to the Apple Books app.
- Add books to the iPhone or iPad Books app using Finder or the Apple Devices app on your Mac or PC.
- Save PDFs to the Apple Books app. These PDFs are uploaded to your iCloud account and remain saved there.
Now, when you open the Books app and go to Library, you may see a cloud icon under some books and PDFs. Here’s what it means:
- Cloud icon: This book is added to your library, but it’s not downloaded locally to your device. Or, this PDF is saved to your iCloud but not saved locally on the device. Removing or hiding such titles will not free up space on your device.
- No cloud icon: If you don’t see a cloud icon, it means this book or PDF is saved locally on your device and is therefore taking up space. You can delete such books to reclaim storage space.
Delete books from iPhone or iPad to free space
Open the Books app, tap the three dots icon underneath a title, and choose Remove > Remove Download.
In addition to that, you can follow these steps to select one or more books and remove them together:
1) Open the iOS Books app and tap Library. Then, tap the menu icon at the top and select Downloaded to see all your books and PDFs saved for offline reading.
2) Tap the three dots menu button at the top, followed by Select.
3) Select one or more books and hit the trash icon, followed by Remove Downloads.
Note that if you select PDFs or items not from the Book Store, you’ll see an additional “Delete Everywhere” option. Choosing this will delete the item from both your iCloud and local storage. As a result, it’s removed from everywhere, including your other Apple devices.
Note:
- You can also tap the three dots menu icon in the Library tab of the Books app, followed by Remove Downloads, and then choose to remove them automatically after you’ve finished reading a title.
- You can also delete the entire Books app, and it will remove all downloaded books except the data saved in iCloud.
Re-download deleted books
Like other media items (songs, movies, ringtones, etc.) purchased from Apple, your purchased books can be re-downloaded as many times as you want unless your purchase was refunded, Apple Books Store is unavailable in your country, or the rights holder/publisher of the book has, for whatever reasons, pulled its content from the iTunes Store.
To re-download a book, go to the Books app and tap Library. If your book appears here and you see a little cloud icon, that means this book has not been downloaded to your device. Tap the three dots icon and choose Download.
Alternatively, you can go to the Book Store section of the Books app and find the book. You can also use the search bar to locate the title and hit the Get or Download button.
Important: You can’t re-download a deleted PDF if you deleted it from everywhere!
Use your computer to delete books from your iPhone or iPad
If you manually synced books to your iOS device using your computer (the process is similar to syncing music), you can use that Mac to Windows PC to remove them.
- Connect your iPhone or iPad to your computer using a USB cable.
- Open Finder on Mac or Apple Devices app on Windows PC and select your device.
- Go to the Books section, uncheck the box for ‘Sync books onto your iPhone,’ and click Apply. Those books will be removed from your iOS device.
Do more in the Books app: