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Level 1

1 points

All the iBooks for Mavericks problems I've found

1. I can't direct the iBooks library to a specific location. I've got a couple gigs of ePub books that I did not purchase from the iBooks store and can't rely on iCloud for storing them. I have a similar situation with my movies, music & tv shows. Previously, all of my ePub books were managed thru iTunes (of course) and stored with the rest of my media on a NAS. iBooks brought them local and ate up a sizeable chunk of my SSD on my Air. iBooks needs to return the ability to chose the library location. I want all of my media stored on my NAS.

2. No ability to edit metadata. iTunes was not ideal for editing book metadata because it was designed for artists, titles and track listings instead of authors. But it was better than the non-existant metadata editing in iBooks. Many of the genres (categories) that I had changed in iTunes have reverted to gibberish or previously-entered info after migrating to the iBooks app. All of the metadata changes I made in iTunes seems to have been undone by importing to iBooks. We need the options to adjust them.

3. No reading lists. It's not much different than a playlist. It just needs to be there. Especially if you're reading a series of semi-stand-alone books that don't reference which book in the series it is, because it's not imperative that you read them in order, but it makes for a better read when you do. There's no way to do this at the moment & needs to be fixed.

4. How in the chocolate christ on a pogo stick am I supposed to put one of those non-iCloud books onto my iPad? There's no device integration anywhere that I can see. iTunes was easy. Click, Drag, Pick device or playlist. Done. iBooks seems to make it impossible for non-iCloud books to be moved to an iOS device. The only option that I see is by going BACK into iTunes, opening the iOS device, click the "Books" tab, and turning on the "sync checked books" thing before manually un-checking a thousand that I don't want to sync, erasing everyhing that's already on the device by changing the preference, and then manually syncing. I just fell back into 2003, I think. This is poor integration and needs fixed ASAP. I've got books on my iPad that I still want to read now, but when I'm done and ready to refresh what I have on there, I'm gonna be hella p*ssed if this isn't fixed.

Posted on Oct 23, 2013 10:19 AM

34 replies

MrFrood

Level 1

8 points

Nov 15, 2013 5:04 PM in response to Eric Dannewitz

@Eric - In a nutshell yes !!!

Nov 15, 2013 9:28 PM in response to Eric Dannewitz

@Eric, I wish that was the only problem! There isn't any way to edit metadata in ibooks, so its not a useful catalog. Also, a great number of my pdfs didn't get moved into ibooks when apple automagically moved them out of itunes. They're actually still in my itunes 'books' folder, so they're not lost, but when I try to add them to ibooks ibooks gets confused and says they're already there. And finally, as far as I can see there is no way to manually manage books using ibooks, you have to 'sync'. I refuse to do that. The recent update did nothing to address any of these concerns so obviously it isn't a priority for Apple.

So I find myself wondering, is calibre the best thing out there currently or are there other better options? Anyone have any experience? I'm starting to really look forward to a day when I can leave the clutches of Apple for the clutches of Google. Why should we pay more for a poor (similarly poor I'm sure) experience? I just kind of feel like, if computing is going to be a pain in the *** anyway then I might as well go with the cheaper alternative.