MAC SOFTWARE
Shine a spotlight on sagacious solutions to your most maddening Mac maladies
Our spotlight on solutions to Mac maladies
I can’t read Apple’s free iBooks
QI recently added Apple’s free iOS user guides for iPhone and iPad to the iBooks collection on my Mac. When I try to open either, I’m told that a different Apple ID was used to buy them, which isn’t the case, and they work fine on my iPhone. How can I read them on my Mac? by Maddie Pleasants
ARestart your Mac, and open the iCloud pane. Sign out, wait a few seconds and then sign in again. Also try removing the books from your Mac and then redownloading them.
If those don’t help, open Settings on your iPhone. At the top of the first page, tap your name. You’ll see all your current Macs and iOS devices listed. Tap your Mac there and check its details – in particular that it’s a trusted device.
If that looks fine, shut down your Mac, wait 20 seconds, and start it up in safe mode (see bit.ly/macsafemd). That clears a lot of caches and could help eliminate any misunderstandings over your account and the Mac’s authorisations. Then restart your Mac normally and try again.
If this problem only occurred after a macOS system update was installed, that could be the cause. In this case, you need to download the latest Combo updater for your current version of macOS (go to support. apple.com and search for ‘combo update’ and your installed version number) and install that, as it can sometimes fix such strange problems.
Another trick is to repair your home folder’s permissions – see bit.ly/repperms.
At the end of all that, if you have no joy, call Apple support, as only it can fix problems that might lie server-side with the store.