Can't edit epub info in iBooks on OS X 10.9 Mavericks

I totally agree that this needs to be implemented ASAP.

Tried to find this feature y'day, directly after installing Mavericks, and was pretty disappointed that this did not work, because now my book library is more disorganized than before.

So the only benefit from iBooks is that we can read our books at a Mac, but which we also could do before with Adobe Digital Editions?!?

(except that we needed to manage 2 libraries - iTunes and Adobe Digital Editions)

Apple - pls update ASAP.

I completley agree. I was shocked and Extremly surprised that u cant edit this information! I was able to do it itunes now with this new ibook they took it away! Some of my genres are incorrect, I want to be able to organize everything. I thought apple wanted to make peoples lives easier! Instead this is an unorganized mess. Why couldnt they make ibooks just like itunes, the abilty to edit the infromation, change genres, you should be able to make reading list, similar to playlist, where u just drag the book over. I wanted to make a "To Read" list, organize books into list that i like, and do it simply on my imac and have it sync with ibooks. But this is a mess and not very good of apple not to let people organize their own librarys.

I can't agree more. I thought I was missing something; sadly not, apparantly.

iBooks was the feature I was most excited for with the recent upgrade, but there seems to be more cons than pros as compared to itunes right now...

I want my library to look great with book cover art. It'd be really nice to be able to add/change them like before.

Please make information editing possible, first of all and make it easy.

I like that we can organize by category now. That's a plus!

I am right there with you. This was the sole feature that I was excited for. Its sad that the FREE Calibre program is a far superior program. I was so disappointed to find that I can no longer drag and drop my books to my iPad and in order to add any more I have to use the Sync function and "Erase all songs, movies and books from my iPad" since I have always manually managed content on the iPad. God knows where the books are now, somewhere hidden in the compuer library no longer in legible titles. It looks all alphnumeric. You literally have NO control with iBooks, no view in finder, no editing ANYTHING. I had misspelled an authors name in iTunes and it carried over into iBooks and I figured I woould just rename it, Nope. Cannot do that anymore. I will attempt to submit this to Apple support and hope that an update will fix this. Hey we got the "traffic" light muttons removed from iTunes and the Gray background back, maybe iBooks will get updated to a usable state. End rant.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback

What the **** Apple devs? How can they release this half baked product!

First of all, iBooks got stuck importing my ebooks and pdf's from iTunes! I have around 1400 files. I had to clean install my Mac to get it fixed. (Now It won't import at all. I have to put everything myself!)

Second. Why I can't edit metadata?! I need this ability to organise my books and ESPECIALLY pdf files. Oh wait, you don't know that iTunes can't embed metadata in pdf? And now I have to re-enter all information myself again!!!! On SOOO many files. This is outrageous and just ridiculous!

And last, but probably not least, where is ability to choose my library destination?! I need to keep it on separate drive, I don’t have much space on this sh*ty SSD. Please do that. I was almost happy that guys didn’t ruin OSX as much as iOS7, but this is just ridiculous!

I’m waiting for update, otherwise I will leave apple ecosystem, and never ever buy anything again from iTunes!

Regards,

M

Yet another issue with this crappy Mavericks. I was just frantically looking or a "Get Info" menu option in iBooks, only to be sorely disappointed. I bet the reason they didn't include this feature was due to the expectation that you'll puchase all your e-books through them, more so eliminating the need to edit the meta-data because it'd be done for you.

But Apple, that isn't the case! Give us editing capabilities!

Agreed. I quite like Mavericks so far. But iBooks is a step backwards, as compared to iTunes Books. I used to be able to drop or sync books from Calibre into iTunes and then end up with nicely organized, user-defined Categories in iBooks on my iPad. It worked really well. Now, it's a mess.

EDIT: I used the "Feedback" link someone posted above. Thanks for that.

Feedback submitted, we shall see what happens. Until then, I'll be going back to 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Feedback submitted too. Back on ML since yesterday. iBooks Mac is a mess 😠

Having spent a couple of hours with this last night, I'm really wondering if the whole goal isn't to remove control of the ebook library from the user.

First, once you move your books over to iBooks, you lose the ability to move back to iTunes, as the "Books" section totally disappears. Second, the folder with your epub and PDF file is nowhere to be found. I'm sure it's just tucked away somewhere invisibily in the library, but to the average user it's gone.

I'm wondering if this isn't an outgrowth of of the Justice Department settlement somehow -- basically locking down iBooks so the only content it really offers full support for is content purchased from the iBooks Store.

I mean, I will admit I'm not the average user, who maybe has a dozen books in their library -- books they more than likely purchased from iTunes. I have all the books I purchased from Barnes and Noble for my old, pre-iPad Nook, which I personally un-DRMed and moved to iTunes, plus a lot of other epub files I acquired from other sources. If you buy all your content from Apple, then I'm sure all the meta-tags follow the same pattern, and the books all sort and group correctly. But if you have epubs acquired "in the wild", then you're faced with the task of going through and making sure the author of all 65 Stephen King novels isn't King, Stephen or SteveKing or something.

H*ll, you can't even add your own artwork, which seems like it ought to be totally OK (why should it matter if I replace the TV-tie-in cover of Game of Thrones with a scan of the cover of my paperback?).

I can see, from a product management point of view, someone at Apple saying "well, the only reason users need to edit meta data is if they have pirated books, so why even bother with that functionality? If someone need to do that, they can donwload Calibre or Sigil."

I'm going to try to roll back with Time Machine tonight, and hope it puts everything back the way it was (after all, isn't that the point?). If it doesn't, then that seems a lot more sinister.

Agreed, this is crazy!

And this is not just about purchased content. iBooks lets you organize pdf files (which make up the majority of my library). But how do I set the titles?

I certainly would understand if there were some legal prohibition from me changing the title of a purchased work (ok, I wouldn't really understand it, but I could at least follow the logic) but my own pdf file?!?!?!

What's so perplexing (sorry, I'm agreeing with everybody here) is that they already had a working model in iTunes. So they must have worked harder to make iBooks different! Lunacy!

Bark!

Solution! Close iBooks.

First it was finding where Apple moved our books, which is located:

(Select go, hit the option key, library)

~/Library>Containers>com.apple.BKAgentService>Data>Documents>iBooks>Books

Selecting the folder for which book you're looking for (Apple has given them random names)

You will see whatever cover photo is sitting there* as "cover.jpg" drag that to the desktop, replace image in preview.

Find the iTunesMetaData.plist file and open with xCode or textedit and change the information.

Open Itunes, Sync books.

*If the ebook is from calibre it will be in Content>Resources>_cover_.jpg

Or you could just Download Calibre, change the cover & information and convert to epub, open with iBooks.

Depending if you like the challenge and want to do it manually or have a program do it for you.