Calibre to iPad with large numbers of ebooks (on a mac)

Hi All,

I won't rehash to whole Apple "stole my functionality" thing* but I've just been given a new ipad and I want to know the quickest way to get my 3000 (yes, 3000+) books onto it. I'm a believer in just whack everything on to the device and then I don't have to phaff about trying to figure out what to upload etc.

I've just tried using itunes (which I had to upgrade to the latest version to connect to the ipad) and moved some books over using that. Dear me. Horrid. And slow. And iBooks has improved slightly, but it's still...ordinary. Back to Marvin I go. But I digress.

I'm beginning to think that using Dropbox might be the way to go (although, certainly a pain at the beginning uploading them all). Sync my library and then any new books can be downloaded to the device.

What do other people do? What's your workflow? I've tried using the content server etc but there's no "select all" (that I've found).

I'm using Mac 10.10, Calibre 2.51 (the only thing I can depend on) and an ipad with ios 9.2.1 (my ipod touch still has 8.4 on it because I don't trust something to not break if I update it).


* but they did. *Pouts*.