Not impressed! No edit info, no library management!

Granted but, using App Cleaner is still the last step, right? If I understood you correctly, I'm supposed to see my iTunes e-book library before I use App Cleaner if I follow your directions. Or, did I misunderstand? That's quite possible... I was a PC guy until just a year ago so I still feel a little dim-witted about doing things with a Mac.

Julian,

Locate your original files. They may be in the old iTunes media folder in a subfolder called 'books' or

in the hidden new location mentioned in one of the early posts here... Move them all to the desktop to keep them from being accidentally deleted.

Then you need to erase iBooks and all related files first. The reason is that presently your iTunes can't handle books because it has been 'ruined' / neutered. The only way to regain book functionality is by erasing iBooks. Follow the early steps mentioned.

Once iBooks is gone and iTunes restored to formal glory, you need to find a way to get those book files on the desktop back into your iTunes library without losing the original metadata... I believe this last step is what Andy was addressing. There are several methods to try for this last step, some have been successful others not so... but those with a backup have an additional few methods to try so all is not lost for them.

Well, I hope this explanation helped. I'm not an expert but put in quite a bit of time this weekend to get things fixed in my library. Best of luck and let us know if your metadata was preserved...

Hi all, and you're welcome. I experimented and was successful in my case, but it sounds like there are various other permutations that may require different solutions. I have a Mac, for instance, and no Windows machine available to try that on. But there are a few key concepts:

1.) It is the bookstoreagent that affects where the books are stored and that disables the Books tab in iTunes. Killing that process is the most important part. If it's not killed, it won't matter what you do otherwise.

2.) Add all the books back to iTunes using File: Add to Library, whether directly from the new iBooks storage directory or from a copy of that directory placed elsewhere. I had thought there might be some other service running that would prevent importing, so that's why I copied the whole directory elsewhere. (For problems with metadata, you should have a number of backups of the iTunes Library files, which is where your metadata is stored. Reverting to one of those should restore it for you. The more you monkey around with the app in a broken state, the more you may lose.)

3.) In iTunes, use File: Library: Organize Library: Consolidate Files to get all your files back into the iTunes storage folders.

4.) I don't think it's actually necessary to delete iBooks. That was simply vengeance on my part. But to delete it, yes, you will need App Cleaner (which is free) or something like it. I frankly don't want or need an iBooks for my laptop, whether it manages the books or not. I find it more sensible to manage my iPhone and iPad content through iTunes. Why should I have to use two applications to do that? Lame-o-rama.

Happy night all! I'm happy to have helped.

Thank you everyone for your help and feedback. Using AppCleaner to delete iBooks (after I had removed the iBooks library and *before* I added the books to iTunes) seems to have fixed the problems. After using AppCleaner, I added the iTunes Media/Books directory back to iTunes. Most if not all of the ebooks and PDFs appear to be there after all. Most of the metadata appears to have been preserved, but some books, for some strange reason, do not have the preserved metadata. And some books are present in more than one copy, again, not really clear why. But.... this is a vast improvement over the previous situation. Now, I have to see if I want to add the iBooks library back also.... the iBooks library has about 20 GB of files while the previous iTunesMedia/Books folder had 8GB of files... I'm not sure if this means that the original iBooks import process took about 20GB of files and left 8GB, or if there is a lot of extra space in the iBooks directory, or what. Frankly, I don't think I have 28GB of e-books.

I'll probably be up for a while getting these books resorted, but at least I have books again. Thank you everyone for your help.

Kevin,

Deleting both the bookstoreagent service and iBooks is necessary to make this work.

I've experimented with over half a dozen repeated upgrades to Mavericks, taking different approaches each time to handle my iBooks reversion. I've tried killing Launch Daemons and Launch Services, and even the bkagentservice -- each has various effects in different sequences of migrations, recoveries, and metadata and book reimports. Your original approach is the one that works most-reliably with the least-invasive changes to a Mavericks system.

Thanks, again, for pioneering this solution.

Steven

Hi

I've been reading this thread and been impressed by the solutions and comments - for which many thanks to all.

However, I've decided to be risk averse and not change anything 'under the bonnet' on my Mac.

Instead, I've added the 'Marvin' book reading app to my iPhone - and added the plugins that Calibre needs to communicate successfully with Marvin. (See the Marvin website for how to do this). Now, all my Calibre books on the Mac can be sent back and forth to Marvin, directly,just by plugging the iPhone into the Mac by USB cable. Syncing is dead easy and ALL the books I've tried to sync so far have come through successfully.

So, No iTunes needed for book syncing, no IBooks and, so far, no more problems.

Now that I've used it for a while and got used to it, Marvin does seem to be a rather good book app.

What do others think?

I've also been reading the whole thread and followed the instructions. I killed bookstoreagent, copied iBooks.app to a directory in my home folder, and deleted it with AppCleaner. I even tried moving BKAgentService and the whole BookKit.framework directory. Then I tried re-adding the books directory to iTunes. It crashed. I tried again and it didn't crash. I've also rebooted several times. In no case did the books option come back to the iTunes sidebar. The tab on my iPhone's page disappears when I move BKAgentService, so I put it back, but it makes no difference. I can't get the Books option in iTunes to appear, even after following every piece of advice in this thread.

I suspect it may have something to do with my upgrading iTunes after installing Mavericks. Do you guys still have iTunes version 1.11.1? I have 1.11.2 and that's about the only thing I can think of that may be different in my computer.

Message was edited by: Lodolfo Lumbre. I accidentally a word.

I just wanted to keep everyone posted that I got a message from an apple employee saying they wanted specific logs. I explained that I had to kill the service and delete the app, because the most fundamental management features like editing metadata and creating a library with pointing to the object instead of copying to exists.

At the end it said he was a part of the iwork team. hmmm

Lodolfo, you need to delete the iBooks app. Simply moving it won't work. If you are nervous about that, make a copy on a removable drive (and then unplug the drive) before deleting it completely. The iBooks entry won't reappear in iTunes until iBooks is completely gone from your Mac.

Marvin seems like a very good app - if it can take care of everything that iBooks can do on the iPhone, then I wouldn't be negative in using it. Actually, its feature set is much richer than iBooks's.

However, I do have one question: can the Marvin app support.pdf files?

I am aware that you can read .pdf files with the Adobe Acrobat Reader app on the iPhone - I just would like to keep all the book content in one app irrespectively of format.

Apple listens if enough people complain. If you hate the current implementation of iBooks, send Apple feedback here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ibooks.html

@StoneSoup:

Thank you! That did the trick. I never expected the app to have any effect on the system when located in a completely random place.

@Alexander Grossman

I sent feedback using that form, and have considered pestering them every day until a fix is issued, but haven't done so, yet. Would that make any difference, same guy sending the same feedback every day?

I just wanted to add a thank you to everyone who has posted the work arounds. I, too, am EXTREMELY disappointed with the iBooks app and its inability to handle metadata. I'll be going back to the iTunes system as soon as I can figure out how to follow the directions. I've already put my complaint in to Apple.

What's with the Author sort order? Now "A. A. Milne" comes before "Charles Dickens". I have about 700 ebooks in my collection and had pretty carefully cleaned up the authors so that I had "Dickens, Charles" and "Milne, A.A." as the sort authors. Now they all sort by first name. What a pain.

The only good news is that iBooks has not totally munged the ePub files. Yes, it renamed them. But I just tried copying some of the ePub files into Calibre and they show up correctly there. At least I can bulk copy everything to Calibre for cleanup of the metadata. If Apple doesn't restore the Sort Author and similar fields I can fix-up the author names in Calibre and then copy the ePubs back to iBook.

The ePubs that I copied from Calbire to iBooks syncrhonized to my iPhone and iPad.

I just had a look at the new deep rooted iBooks folder that can be found in the following location:

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

There are several folders in the iBooks folder:

Books

Downloads

Now here is a weird thing, if you go to iTunes > File > Library and choose the option "Organize Library" iTunes puts a copy of the ebooks from the folder "Books" into the folder "Downloads". The books "Downloads" folder have the old, legible, structure.

This could be a feature, but the problem is that if you use the "Organize Library" option again, iTunes puts again a new copy in the "Downloads" folder. At the end you end up by having lots of copies of the ebooks in the "Downloads" folder.

Any help on better understanding the new ebooks management would be appreciated.