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

It seems Aplple is nervous. They are deleting a lot of posts - this maybe too.....

I've had a number of posts deleted, but I receive comments via email. I wonder if this will get out.

Bob

Who are those greedy bunch of people at Apple actually trying to serve? Their customers of their own pockets??

They have totally excluded developers from their system with their pathetic support of development environments apart from xcode which earns them money.

They have now screwed up my PDF library for the sake of some junk iBooks which I have no intent to use as no doubt the books will be overpriced like the DVD rentals.. Thank fully this O/S is free so I can roll back to LIon and relagate this upgrade to the bucket where it belongs. Who need books & maps anyways. I am a goddam developer and I want my old development machine back. I do not want my machine being turned into a stealth piggy bank for Apple!!!

Hello there, I think the answer to your question is called "Calibre" You can convert PDF files to epub, and even change the cover art there and drag to iBooks. I converted a lot of PDF files to epub and Reading in my iPad and ipod. 😀

http://calibre-ebook.com

Calibre is nice - but offers much less Meta-tagging options. In iBooks (on iOS) you have unpredictable results in sorting books, exept list view. So I have to use "name sort order" frequently for grouping series together.

Trying to do this in calibre fails when loading books into iBooks or iTunes.

I guess the point is, there is no "iTunesMetadata.plist" in .ebup's generated by calibre. So I cant' group books together in iBooks.

Maybe I'm wrong.....

Pathetic is the word.

dscheenaard, I absolutely agree. My use of Calibre was to allow me to get books purchased from Kobo and Kindle into iBooks and to add metadata that might not otherwise have been there. The loss of the iTunes tagging capability has nothing to do with my or others use of Calibre. It's a loss on its own and nothing that I know of takes its place, at least for books purchased from iBooks, of which I have several.

Like many of you I had a nice collection of well-organized books, plus I had iTunes' Books folder mirrored in the cloud using bitcasa so basically all my books were with me all the time.

Now I came across this thread because I too wanted to tag an epub in iBooks, and I ended up discovering this monstruous iBooks' folder (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books, serioulsy?) and, icing on the cake, there is no way that I can keep mirroring a folder where epub files become 0D1BB7BDQAA6037472D5E624BV2E2F folders.

Yep, Backintosh, that's right. I thought Apple had decided to support .epub files now that they had a first-party app that could read them (after years of waiting for that simple functionality). Now we find out that they still do not support epub at all, really. They convert epub into something else entirely.

This really is a slap in the face for users who have brought their own book along with them. I mean, how user-hostile is it? To take away functionality that was fundamental to the experience? And then to replace it with a ridiculous new proprietary system? I am die-hard Apple, but this has shaken my trust in them.

That's interesting. I just took a closer look at the new "library". Only one of my epub books was converted to a folder. Within that folder, it's in an HTML format. Each chapter is an HTML file and there is an iTunesMetaData.plist file. The rest of my epub books are still single epub files that I can open in Calibre although they still have those strange names. And pdfs are still named with the original name.

I have no idea why it decided to convert that one epub and not the others.

Same issue here, if you dump the weird named ePubs into calibre does the original name pop back out? Is there anyway of breaking the code they used to change the names?

Yes, the original name is there. And so is any previously added metadata, at least metadata added with Calibre. As for the code or algorithm they used, I have no idea. I also have not tried changing the names because they're used in books.plist and I'm not interested in hacking that. Way too much work. I'll just keep doing what I was doing, keeping a separate copy of all ebooks that aren't in iBook format and hope they fix this.

You can change it name even artwork using Calibre, I use it to correct some PDF files to convert it to epub.

When you open Calibre, and drop the file into calibre, right click or control click over the file then click on "Edit metadata".

and I think thats all.

The iWork people got a response from Apple: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6049?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Isn't it unusual for Apple to post a list of future features, even if they are re-introducing them?

Hopefully iBooks isn't far behind.