On a recent flight from Las Vegas to New York, I was baffled by an iOS storage decision that left me quite bored. When opening the native Books app on my iPhone, where I spend most flights reading, I found to my dismay those little cloud icons next to the books indicating that they were not downloaded locally to my phone, and only remained present in iCloud.
Of course, being on a plane, downloading them from iCloud wasn't an option. JetBlue Wi-Fi? Good one. That thing is more inconsistent than Melbourne weather.
This wasn't the first time that this has happened. On my outbound flight to Vegas a couple weeks back, I ran into the same issue, so this time I made sure to pre-download a couple books I'm in the middle of while at the gate. (There’s a Download option in the three-dot menu next to each book.) But still, an hour later, when I opened the app to start reading, I found that their local copies were already undownloaded.
Once I landed, I did some digging online and found that this problem has been going on for at least 10 years (!!!), and thousands of people across various posts have marked this as an issue they had experienced. I found two “solutions”:
- Stop using iCloud for Books, rather just storing them locally
- Make sure to have 10-20% of storage free on my phone to stop Apple from automatically freeing up space by removing local copies of books
Turning off iCloud for Books
This would work, but it would be a shlep and have some tradeoffs. Many impatient people trying this solution would be devastated when they turn off the iCloud for Books toggle in the settings app and find all their books have vanished. The forum, to its credit, makes it clear that you need to save a copy of all your books before turning off iCloud for Books. But how does one do that? I have 200+ books on my phone amassed over the course of 15 years of iPhone reading. Is there an easy way to get them all in a folder on my computer and then an easy way to put them back on after I turn off iCloud? Long gone are the days of using the computer or iTunes to manage things on an iOS device.
I assume, since I’ve been using iCloud for Books until now, that the book files will be on my Mac somewhere, and I can probably AirDrop them back to my phone after turning off iCloud. But will the AirDrop automatically add them to the Books app, or will they go to Files, from which I need to “Add to Books” for each file one at a time? And will my reading progress and historical timeline be saved when I add the books back, or will they be treated like newly purchased books? I suppose I can do a test with one or two books and see. Either way, this is not a great user experience, and for someone a little less tech savvy, this is probably already too much to ask.
And then there are the downsides. Turning iCloud for Books off means my Apple devices are no longer syncing books, they’re just stored locally on my phone. As of now, this is mostly okay for me, since I don’t read books on another Apple device, but I’m sure many others have iPads too, and this would be quite a hindrance. I remember in the early-to-mid 2010s when Apple made a lot of fanfare about magically syncing books across devices using this new thing called iCloud, how you could put down a book on your phone and pick up where you left off on your tablet. But now Apple is leaving me with no choice but to turn off its own cloud syncing service if I want to keep my books downloaded?
The whole thing is just very unclear. You get the option in the three-dot menu to download the book from the cloud, but then within mere hours, it can be gone again. There’s no warning or explanation, and no way to set an expiry time (e.g., keep this book downloaded for 7 days). Books just randomly get hoovered back up to the cloud, and if you’re flying or travelling or simply don’t have access to the internet, you’re stuck without your books.
Keeping more free storage on my iPhone
This is really the meat of the issue. If my iPhone has less than 10-20% of free storage space, it will start deleting local copies of books if they are stored in iCloud. This is what I found out through my online research. There’s no formal documentation about this on Apple’s website, nor any setting or notice on my phone. It’s just something that apparently happens, according to users on Apple’s community forums (and these users are not Apple employees). Great user experience.
While I respect Apple trying to solve my storage woes by offloading local copies of my data to the cloud, it makes absolutely no sense that of all things they would choose books. Each book is probably 2 MB, with many around 500 KB, and these are the guys you want to delete to save some space?
What about having an option to clear the vast amounts of built-up junk from various other apps? Going through my storage settings now, I can see the following apps that are hogging my storage with no recourse. I’m listing below the “Documents & Data” amounts, not the “App Size” amounts, although those deserve their own mention for being unforgivably bloated as well.
- YouTube: 1.1 GB
- Mail: 1.4 GB
- Google Maps: 0.7 GB
- X: 0.5 GB
- And the motherlode of all inexplicable storage hogs, System Data: 10.6 GB
Even making provisions for some necessary caches that aid performance, I’m sure that more than 10 GB out of this 15 GB should be reclaimable, but there are no settings to do so. Some people recommend deleting and re-installing third-party apps to clear their caches, but again, if this is the solution, we have a broader user experience problem on our hands.
Please, Apple
I love the actual experience of reading books on my iPhone. I’m sure some people will fall to their knees in agony about this, but ebooks work for me in a lot of ways that I can discuss another time, and don’t worry, I also own physical copies.
Regardless, I should be able to choose what stays on my phone and what gets sucked up to iCloud to optimise storage. And if I can’t choose, I should at least be notified in some way. Apple giving users no warning that pressing the download button next to a book means just about nothing is ridiculous from a company that is besotted with the notion of “it just works”.
Why have community forums with a “Me too” voting button when you don’t respond to real issues affecting thousands of users for over a decade? Well, at least we have Liquid Glass! And Apple Intelligence! And Siri AI! And folding iPhones!