iBooks in Mavericks lost 700 books

I'm on the same boat. Actually I've been using iBooks since it showed up on Mavericks on the early betas and all my books were showing fine up until the last beta and the GM when they briefly showed on the library and then dissapeared after importing.

In fact all your iBooks are in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks but most are in uncompressed folders (at leat in my case).

I tried to erased all the contents in that library folder and start over again importing and ended up with the same dire results. I thought it was an issue in my part but never got to the point of doing a clean install just to wait and see if after the offcial release others will have the same issue. Not saying I'm "happy" that I'm not the only one but at least I know it's not only me.

Anyone already called apple support? I do have apple care for my macbook so I will try to give them a call tomorrow or somewhere later this week.

Same here, iBooks is not displaying my entire collection even though all the files are there in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks

If I manually try to add the missing epubs (by dragging and dropping) I get a message saying 'This book is already in your library. Do you want to replace it with the one you're adding?'

On clicking 'Replace' I get a message saying 'The Operation could not be completed. Operation not permitted.' The books are still there on my iPad, just not showing up in iBooks on my rMBP. Am I missing something here or is this a bug?

Same problem here as well. Import successful from iTunes to iBooks when I installed Mavericks (it took a long time to import a few thousand ePubs). Now any epubs that were not purchsed from Apple are not displayed in iBooks although it knows that they are imported (I cannot re-import them) and all epubs have been removed from iTunes. What a major step backwards. I wish I had not upgraded now! Please suggest a fix... Apple Support.

Same problem as everyone else. Books are there in cryptic file names but won't display. Double clicking on them to open in iBooks does nothing. Very frustrating Apple! Reimporting them does not work either.

Here's a workaround for everyone:

1. Go through the iBooks data folder and double click on each book to see if it opens in iBooks. If it does not, meaning it's one of the *lost* books. Move it out of the iBooks data folder to a folder on your desktop. When you are complete, all the lost books should be in this new folder and removed from the ibooks folder.

2. Download Calibre (google it).

3. Open each epub in the new folder you created per #1 with Calibre. Save it to disk from Calibre using yet another new folder (call it iBooks Import)

4. Now, go to the iBooks Import folder with all your exported epubs and drag just the epub for each book into the Library window of the iBooks app.

This should reimport your lost books and they will show up as they did in your iTunes library before iBooks lost them.

Hope that works for you. It worked for me.

-m

Thanks dharmaman for this - before I'm going to try this, do you know if this keeps the annotations and highlights I did on iOS on these books?

I don't know the answer, but my guess is that it will not keep the annotations as I expect that Calibre won't maintain those through the export and reimport process. My suggestion is that you try it on of your books that has the least annotations to see if it works. If not, then you may have to wait for Apple to generate a fix or lose your iBooks specific annotations to get your books back short term.

-m

I appreciate the intent of your workaround, but (1) for several thousand epubs it is not practical to do that one by one, (2) I have little confidence that the re-import will last any longer than the original, and (3) there still is no way to edit author names, cover art or metadata. I tried doing it in calibre, but the modifications didn't transfer to iBooks when re-imported. I also found that I can't use a 2nd computer that has never run iBooks -- the iTunes folder already fails to show books. So I think the only real solution until Apple fixes the problem is to revert back to OS 10.8. At least Time Machine works.

I'm afraid it's a fix that doesn't work for me. You loose indeed all annotations when you use Calibre to convert the epub to epub (if you just "save" it will save the same file - with annotations - but iBooks will not see it after the first quit.). I also tried to open a epub from project Gutemberg without annotations in Calibre, save it (without re-converting in epub) and the only way to "keep" it in iBooks was to make one annotation. In short, I think there's some serious bugs in iBooks and probably there are some issues in the way iBooks deals with all the metadata in the epub file.

BTW, have you noticed that if you double click on the epub files in the iBooks folder they become folders with an ".epub" extension? Those of the "missing" books stay epub files if you double click them, those that can be seen by iBooks become folders.

The only "good news" is that however all the books are still there in the folder "~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books", with annotations and all, the only problem is that they don't show up in the Library in iBooks. Crappy software!!

Edited: added last sentence - all books are in the iBooks folder

Well, I found a safe workaround to get my "invisible" books back into iBooks: get the epub file out of the iBooks folder, drop it into iBooks so that it becomes a .epub folder, get it out again, delete the "iTunesMetadata" file which is created inside each .epub folder and then drop the folder back into iBooks. Everything is preserved - annotations, highlights etc. And so far all the books stay in iBooks.

A lot of work to read books in iBooks on Mavericks.. which I couldn't do yesterday anyway..... and in my case the books I wanted in IBooks for Mavericks I can read on my iPad and iPhone .. as I could yesterday - I only had 3 books in iTunes and they imported... it is the syncing that doesn't work for me.... so I will just pretend iBooks for Mavericks doesn't exist yet... as in terms of actually reading anything, it doesnt - and I am not holding my breath for a fix as Apple never repaired the two account problem those of us who had mobile me encountered...