How to Add the iBooks Folder in the iCloud

Hello everybody!

I am saving a lot of web pages as PDFs on my iPad. The only way to do this really fast and also have both the URL and the save date printed on the PDF is to save the PDFs to iBooks.

But iBooks is dead-end-ish, so to speak. You can not annotate the PDFs in it and since iOS still does not allow batch share it is cumbersome to get them into an app that allows that (which in my case would be DEVONthink mostly and sometimes PDF Expert).

Back on the Mac I can drag the PDFs from iBooks to DEVONthink but I'd love to automatize that. Here comes Hazel. Or so I thought.

The iBooks folder on iCloud drive is not visible in the Finder. But thanks to Fresh which indicates lately added or opened files I could find out the folder: Users/username/Library/Mobile Documents/iBooks/iBooks/.

Fresh even allows me to open that folder, and then the Finder allows me full access to it (move, delete, etc.). Just when I add the folder to the side bar so I can pick it in Hazel it does not work—the iCloud drive folder is all I get, without any iBooks folder in it.

Is there any way to add this folder to Hazel to generate a rule to move every new PDF straight into the DEVONthink Inbox folder?

That folder is iCloud's internal folder. What Finder shows for it is not actually what exists when Hazel looks at it.

I would look into something that doesn't use iCloud for this case. Maybe share the file to Dropbox instead?

Thanks for your reply.

Sadly iBooks doesn't allow to save to anything but its own internal iCloud folder.

And the new iOS 10 print feature with which printable content can get sent as PDF to any app that handles PDFs does not include URL and date.

Can't really think of a good workaround short of using something else besides iBooks, unfortunately.