Trying to search local collections in Books

Question

Level 1

9 points

Trying to search local collections in Books

I’ve got a huge collection of pdfs on my iPad which I’ve been accumulating for years. They’re filed in Collections I created.

Alas, I’ve just realized with 18.1.1, Search in Books only searches the store for new content. This used to work and Search was context sensitive to what was being viewed. No more. Search automatically now switches context to one of the Stores.

I’ve tried searching for pdfs, which will temporarily show my Library, but any effort to narrow the results by entering the name immediately narrows the results to None from the Stores. Results of all 500+ isn’t useful.

So, how can I search my curated collections? Any availability to use metadata such as Source=Library Name:*name*.pdf?

Request to community at large: Assuming spotlight indexing, in concept if not in strictest sense, per OS is being deployed across the Apple ecosystem it seems there should be metadata keywords, attributes and wildcards which can be used in the various Search fields, i.e. Finder, mail, Books………..to tailor results

Please share, I can’t find it.

iPad Pro, 18

Posted on Feb 24, 2025 4:57 PM

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Answer 1

lbf42

Level 1

8 points

Apr 7, 2025 1:37 PM in response to OXR

Spotlight Search: If your PDFs are indexed, you might be able to search for them using Spotlight (swipe down on the home screen and type the file name).

Source: an LLM. Just checked it, and the stochastic parrot is kinda right:

Works, but spotlight search is still dumb as ****. CAM finds campaigns.pdf. CAMP does not find it, since other hits bubbled to the top, which are not PDFs but some webpages I do not recall visiting. CAMPAIGN finds campaigns.pdf.

Also, if you have campaigns.pdf in Books, but not yet opened it (i.e. downloaded to device), Spotlight does not find it.

Any search params like "CAMPAIGNS PDF" or an added "in:Books" does not work, either.

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Answer 2

OXR Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 7, 2025 3:28 PM in response to lbf42

Well, I thought I had posted this under iPadOS since it’s specific to that platform because that’s where my collection of pdfs are stored. I had assumed indexing, or some functional equivalent was available on the platform, but apparently not. Search capability seems to have degraded. As I mentioned, it used to be context specific, i,e, selecting Library as opposed to Store used to search the Library. That no longer seems to be the case. All search results begin with results from Store, even if a filename with the search term exists in Library, it’s not included in the search results. Only searching for the term pdf yields all the pdfs in the Library. Any attempt to whittle the results by filename yield zero results. I’d enter a bug report but I can’t find a description of expected behavior.

This used to work. If I had not created Collections and sorted accordingly, I’d have no hope of making use of my reference Library and that can’t be the end goal.

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Trying to search local collections in Books