Back up and move your ebooks

Keep all your reading material safely stored on your Mac

- Phil King

If you're a voracious reader of ebooks, and have hundreds of them in your Books app library (including some from other sources), you may well want to back them up to external storage - so that you don't lose them, and also perhaps to free up some space on your Mac's internal drive.

How to do so isn't immediately apparent, however. While Apple makes it easy to find and move (or copy) the media libraries from others first-party apps - such as Music, TV, and Photos - to an external drive, this isn't the case with the Books app.

Hidden books

For Books, it's not easy to find the files, as they're secreted away inside a Containers folder inside a user's Library folder. There's not even the option to right-click on an ebook in the Books app and select 'Show in Finder', as in Music; or to select 'Get info' and find the file path under the File tab, as in the TV app.