All the iBooks for Mavericks problems I've found

Point 1, totally agree. I have 100+ gigs of PDFs and books. Mostly PDFs. I have them in iTunes. 10.9 will move them to some no name directory on my main hard drive, and not on my NAS. That is a NO GO for me. What the **** Apple? You allow iTunes to be stored on different directories, why not allow the same thing for iBooks?

Your other points are great too. Plus, did you know that iBooks also will supposedly rename all the stuff as well, so if you had 'Sound on Sound Magazine Oct 2013.pdf' in iTunes, it becomes a string of gibberish in a folder hidden in your ~/Library

This is totally a DO NOT INSTALL issue for me. Sorry Apple, you screwed it up.

All my ebooks are on my iMac. Only a small selection are synced to my iPhone, and a larger selection to my iPad. How do I continue to organize my collection this way with the new iBooks for Mavericks 10.9?

You can still only sync certain books with your iOS device.

The bigger issue is WHY Apple decided to move everything into a buried folder. Why not just have a Books directory in the ~/ home directory???

I know this is not ideal and whilst Apple work on a fix for this here's my workaround.

I've put the new Mavericks Books folder to my Finder Favorites by doing the following -

1) Open Finder

2) Press CMD+SHIFT+G to get to the 'Go to the Folder' Menu

3) Enter ~/Library

4) Navigate to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books - This is where all the books and PDFs are stored

5) Drag and Drop the Books Folder to the Finder Favorites Menu

From here I'm able to drag and drop all your PDFs into the Books Folder.

The iPhone sync actually works fine for me with no changes straight from iTunes.

Hope this helps!

Allow me to agree. iBooks is an embarrasement. This feels like some first year intern got assigned the entire iBooks project. Absolutely no way to edit metadata? ***?? I've got an ebook that comes up with no cover data. No matter what, I can't get it to add a cover. I even edited the metadata in Calibre and tried to upload the new book and it still has no cover! If you go into the incredibly hidden folder that holds the books, it doesn't keep them as epub docs it keeps them as folders with an epub extension and the folders are named with gibberish! Its like its actively working against the editting of metadata. Please fix ASAP.

Yes, I have to say. iBooks is a disaster. One wonders what happened here.

How is it possible that the books are covered somewhere deep in a system library without any opportunity to move them back to the media disk. Has anybody ever thought about the limited space with SSD drives. No ability to edit meta data. Steve Jobs would be furious.

Some people at my local Apple store have suggested working with Good Reads or similar apps and move the books away from Apple. Good Reads acutally does all what is missing in iBooks.

This is great, iBooks just copied my entire epub and PDF collection (over 700 files) to my main harddrive, filling it pretty much to the brim!

My entire folder structure is gone! It is going to take hours to first use TimeMachine to get my original collection folder back and then sort out what I have already read and what was on my iPad ready to be read in the near future... This is a really big issue! I need to be able to maintain my own file structure, iTunes always gave me that option (both for books and music), no I'm forced to this?

I guess I'm starting a search for a simple and fast epub/pdf reader for iOS now.. I always loved iOS for this on my iPad, but this is a disaster.

Well, I think what I am going to do is when I run iBooks for the first time, make sure my Books directory is renamed to something else. Then, after it has run, check to see if iTunes is still keeping PDFs in playlists (as in does iBooks clear out all the stuff out of iTunes, or not). If not, then I will relink PDFs with the playlists after I rename the Books directory back.

I'll probably end up using iDocument 2 to manage all my Books, and maybe I'll create an Applescript that will copy something out of iDocument 2 to iBooks.......

But then again, I hear there might be a bug fix for iBooks coming up.......

This is some ridiculous nonsense! I mean whats the meaning of all this changes? Apple wants to be whimsical like Microsoft now?

I believe Apple have been taking the initiative of moving towards an object-oriented mode of interaction for the user with their data, rather than have users deal with data on a file-level. In this design and UI/UX method, users interact with objects, such as photos, books, and music tracks, contrary to working with photo files, book files, and music files.

The main advantage from a user-experience perspective, whereby a book “object” would not just comprise of the contents of the file, but a set of metadata as well, which makes it an actual “virtual book”, and not just a file. This optimizes the organization, interaction, and utilization of the resource for the user, and renders a more natural form of one’s interaction with their data. With such an approach there is a plethora of advantages that can be implemented on the filesystem and OS side as well, whereby they would be able to enhance many elements such as filesystem performance, journaling, etc. to say the least.

I am definitely with such a move, as it enhances computing in general, in the long run. BUT, Apple’s approach with most of their enhancements tends to be rather sporadic, and you end up having to deal with a lot more pain before you get to the gain. And here we have a prime example in the case of the abysmal iBooks app in Mavericks.

Apple overlooked the fact that they are breaking the current setup that people are running in order to keep their data in place; and this is where I disagree with Apple. I went ape sh** when I saw that iBooks had somewhat consumed my eBooks, and was enraged by the fact that I couldn't even clean up the new book library now that the app “took over”. At least give me the option to not abide by your new system, or at least warn me, or give me some info so I can know how to work with this “new method” that you decided to force on me... and implement it all the way before you decide to have it take over my personal data.

As of the current release, the iBooks app is a bit of a lost child; it should either become more like iPhoto (object-oriented), or more like iTunes (more file oriented), but not stay right smack in the middle where it just doesn’t work.

A slightly easier (though equally silly) method for transferring non-iCloud books from iBooks on Mavericks to your iPhone or iPad:

Open iBooks in Mavericks, right-click on the book you want to transfer, go to Share -> Email, and email the book to yourself. Then open it on your iOS device. I guess if you have a huge file that might not work, but for most reasonably sized books it works like a charm.

This is more or less what I have been doing. I emptied out iBooks on Mavericks and put the new files in a Dropbox folder. I open the file in Dropbox on the iPad and select 'open in iBooks'. This stores the file in iBooks so I can read it like before.

I haven't found the curage to connect my iPad to my iMac yet, since it will likely erase the 100 files that are on there now, so I'll have to work my way through them before I can connect it to sync/back-up other stuff I fear.

But sharing through drop box is a way to put stuff in iBooks, it just takes way longer than syncing like before.

This is why I feel like I'm a slave to Apple's whimsy. I never felt like that when I was on Windows. There were problems but felt no "like it or lump it" vibe from apps.

I figured out you can connect iPad to computer, open iTunes, go to iPad section, then On This iPad tab. Now on the left collumn you will see Music, Movies, Books. Click on Books now drag and drop any PDF or EPUB files in there.

For that I think you have to have iPad on Manually Manage blah blah setting. You can't put files into Music or Books etc when Auto Sync is on.

Haha, well take this as a lesson to NEVER have any iOS device on auto sync. Always Manually Manage!

I didn't get a change to test it, but when you upgrade to 10.9, and your iTunes has PDFs in a playlist, are those still there after the update?