Not impressed! No edit info, no library management!

I'm still reeling from the iBooks fiasco... Although I reverted iTunes to the pre-mavericks state and recovered most metadata for PDFs I can't synch my iPad as there are recent files I was unable to recover that I can't afford to lose... I will try after this important conference in London... But I must say it was an unnecessary shock and inconvenience to endure with any warning... There are still issues with personally encoded audio files I've saved and organized as podcasts or iTunes U files that are not synching properly even when changed to an audiobook. As some with Gigs worth of academic books and various files of poetry and educational content... Apple has caused me tremendous headaches...

In terms of the iBooks update I am very wary... "Fool me once........."

Guys,

Anyone have an update, apparentley Apple updated its iBooks for Mac application today. What did they fix? Any changes to the original problem? How do we get iBooks back if we deleted it to test this new release out?

http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/07/apple-releases-ibooks-for-mac-1-0-1-with-bug-fixes -and-stabilty-improvements/

Nick

I haven't heard any details. And iBooks isn't in the App Store (yet). Maybe it will be, eventually. I can't imagine much has changed, though. There's always Bookle, which will unfortunately cease development because if iBooks. Calibre and Sigil are two other good ones. I won't have my books hijacked by iBooks again, though. That was completely without warning and equally completely unacceptable.

Agreed, Kevin. If the iBooks team reads this thread, they should feel deeply ashamed about releasing a product so far below Apple's usual standards. I hope this has taught them not to rush buggy and feature-deficient software to market.

And in case anyone's a little gun-shy about applying new updates after the initial fiasco: I had removed the bookstoreagent and uninstalled iBooks, which reverted successfully back to managing my books in iTunes.

I just installed iTunes 11.1.3 and my books are still manageable within iTunes and still sync with my iDevices. No sign of iBooks anywhere. What a relief.

Steven

Hi StoneSoup,

Seems like the thing to do until Apple gets its act together.

Could you outline the steps to remove bookstoreagent and uninstall iBooks?

Also my 11.1.3 itunes does not list Books any more, so are the steps above recreating a Books tab in itunes?

Thanks.

D

I've been Apple since 1979 when I started an Apple II lab in the school I taught in; I was there for 36 years. I was either the Tech Team Leader (twice for 15 years total) or just on the Tech Team especially as I was moving to retire in 2009. I'm Apple through and through. I've been an Apple Demo Person and the Mac Resource Person at my local Micro Center. I've been a member of my MUG and UserGroup Alliance officer teams.

Mavericks is almost as bad as 7.5.4 was (it was out for about 3 hours until it was descovered it 'killed' the system files). There are more user controls deleted than in any other OS that I can recall; all, I suspect, in the name of unifying iOS and Mac OS. From the inability to modify the info fields (and delete unwanted downloads) in iBooks to iTunes no longer importing Safri Bookmarks, Contacts, e-mail, etc. unless we use iCloud, this is one big smack in the face. When I asked Apple at the 1-800# why the Bookmarks, Contacts, etc. weren't in iTunes anymore, the person (the 3rd one I was switched to for finally getting an answer which I hope is not an indication of the expertise now available) told me it was because technology was moving forward. No kidding. 😟

The Apple management team; Tim, Phil, Jonny, Eddie & Craig; should take a long, hard look at the issues those of us who have been loyal Apple users through the decades are complaining about and make this software work. Aiming to make iOS and Mac OS one big happy OS? Not at this rate. Software not workable or awkward to use? That's Android and Windows; NOT Apple.

Mavericks? Bret, Bart, Beau and especially Pappy are ashamed.

Hi, D,

The solutions are now buried in very long threads. I started a fresh thread to highlight them more clearly:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5489558

I totally agree. Sync has always been a strange thing, especially for books, and I much prefer to manually manage my content. Has anyone figured out a way to do that with iBooks?

9to5mac just posted an article on iBooks and how to use it: http://9to5mac.com/2013/11/10/mavericks-how-to-use-ibooks-for-organizing-reading -and-shopping/

I tried your method and some of the others linked to it, to no avail. When I got to the point of adding my books back to iTunes, most of them ended up under the Music tab with all the metadata and other information stripped. Attempting to add epub files one at a time completely failed.

Thought I would share what DID work for me, and I really don't know why it did work:

Stopped the bookstoreagent process as Kevin/others mentioned. Located that program file at

(/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CommerceKit.framework/Versions

/A/Resources/bookstoreagent) and moved it to my Docs folder.

• Used AppZapper to delete the iBooks app.
• Deleted all the new iBook Book folders under

~/Library/Containers/com.apple/BKAgentService/Data

/Documents/iBooks/Books.

• Restored my iTunes Media Library (had a backup before Mavericks install).
• Upgraded iTunes to 11.1.3.
• Dragged a copy of my original Books folder back to ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media (where it was originally stored).
• Launched iTunes and all my books were back.
• Deleted the bookstoreagent file from Docs folder.

Obviously this won't work for you if you don't have a complete backup of your books from the iTunes Media folder, but it may help you if future Mavericks updates include changes to iTunes that starts the whole set of shenanigans again.

--edited paths to avoid awkward wraps

It took two restarts, but his system worked for me as well. What a shame that Apple is going downhill fast.

Today I carried out the latest updates and magic happened again. I lost most of my pdf's from my Document folder (and not the itunes folder)

That's the way to go Apple. Well done!

Any solution?

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!

You have my eternal gratitude. Seriously man, THANK YOU!!!

Thank You ! Kevin!

Worked like a charm...

....puuh makes me happy to edit and organize my books in iTunes AGAIN!

Greetings

Dirk

Uh oh. After having restored iTunes functionality and recreating my books/PDF library, I went into iTunes today to add some more PDFs only to find that lovely notice that iBooks is now handling my books and PDFs. This time without me asking it to. I'm guessing that there must be some setting left over that triggered the change when something was updated. Here we go again...