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Why is Books for Mac so useless and terrible to manage?

Dear Apple -- it really is time for you to update iBooks v5.0 (5693) and provide far more accessible support for those of us who have audio book collections AND who simply DO NOT want to stream from Apple.

Like many I have had to find the iBooks storage folder - /Users/...../Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

BUT - instead of using the Author, Album/Title as a file structure iBooks uses an entirely unintelligible folder naming convention, like "sha1-bf007569f61943636bb283a56b2ef979e638fc28", which bears NO relation to anything I can recognise.

EQUALLY unintelligible to me - ONE cannot simply edit the file name and tags/exif data for a title - delete the title in iBooks and then add the edited title again without iBooks applying the same name as it had before when the title was deleted -- it seems to be random when this happens. Allow me to provide one example from my over 3,000 titles.

All my titles are named "Author" "Book Title" "Part".mp3 -- but iBooks ignores this if the title has been imported to iBooks in the past.

WHY is there no way to purge and optimise the iBooks database on my Mac Studio Ultra?

When I sync to my iPhone and my pair of iPads -- I see some of the same audiobooks in a different order -- sometimes it is the title name shown in iBooks (hopefully Author-Title-Part) and sometimes it is the file name (always Author-Title-Part) -- and this varies by the device being sync'd.

WHY is there no way to manage the played/unplayed status of books AND no way to run Smart-Collections for played / unplayed etc..?

My Mac Studio, MBP, and all my iOS devices have the very latest operating software and apps.

DEAR APPLE it seems to me that "we" have been asking for this "ever since" iTunes was broken up into separate apps AND YET I have been ignored.

Mac Studio

Posted on Nov 16, 2022 4:56 AM

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Why is Books for Mac so useless and terrible to manage?

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