Every Single Problem with iBooks for Mac

An open letter to Apple

And

To whom it may concern

Steve, where are you?

Maverick is Windows 8 for MacIntosh and iBooks for Mac destroyed my entire library and erased my .pdf’s! Years of work and thousands of Annotations are down the drain. Thank you very much!

Hello Everybody,

Like All of You, I was completely shocked with iBooks!

So shocked, that I am not going to allow this to happen, EVER AGAIN.

I don't care at all what kind of upgrades they are planning on doing, or WHAT THE HECK they THINK they are doing!

What I will do; Mobile SSD & DropBox! Oh, Yes! 😎

Every single PDF I have will be First Stored & Updated on a beautiful 2,5" mobile SSD (Its Ok, only renaming filenames will work for me, at least for the ones I do not own), and then copied to my DropBox Folder. Then with the relavant DropBox app for my device, I will be opening my PDFs ("Open In iBooks" function) and saving them into iBooks!

People you can try it, if you wish. Soooo Easy & Fast! PLUS, your PDFs are Safe! 😉

mschmitz wrote:

An open letter to Apple

P.S.: After carefully trying the suggested solutions from the community, unfortunately without any lasting success, I eventually decided to downgrade back to 10.8 Mountain Lion and wait until OS Kangaroo or Dolphin or however the coming Mac OS might be called.

Michael, I heard a rumour the next OS may be called Dodo.

Thank you, thank you, Courtney! That works great.

I created a folder, linked the folder to Calibre, download books to that folder (Calibre still calls it a "device), then synch individual books in the folder with iTunes.

Unfortunately it seems you have to do each book individually, but at least it works.

Do you mean to say that you actually used items that were NOT downloaded from Apple Store? How dare you! Of course you should not expect them to work on an Apple machine if they are from outside what has been approved by Mother Apple. Apple learned its lesson many moons ago when it was financially decimated by MIcrosoft as it (Apple) allowed people to easily and freely move things around between platforms and programs in contrast to Microsoft's eco-control approach. Of course, Apple then recovered (largely as a result of its care for its customers as well as the simplicity of its software), but now the big A seems to have copied Microsoft's "we own your soul" approach. I do wonder if Apple will soon join the long downhill slide that comes to all of those companies who lose sight of the main game - which is to keep the customer satisfied. I hope not.

Rather than try and clean up after the Apple team, who seem to have let their jobs go to their heads and forgotten they work for the users not themselves, I am trying to figure out a way to clean Maverick off my computer.

Thankfully I have a MacBook Air that has all of my books on it without the iBook debaucle on it.

The worst part of all is that the major reason I bought an iPad was for reading and keeping my many many photography eBooks on it now most of them are gone from the iPad. It is also frustrating that it requires at least 5-6 different apps just to meet the needs of the arrogance of the software and publishing communities.

Pretty disgusted with them right now.

What a nice article. Not.

They say:

"Clicking on “Categories” shows you the genre the books fall under. These are predefined from the iBooks Store and you cannot change the categories."

Which is not true because I have some categories defined "COMPUTERS / Web Development" or "Math - Data Mining" or this one "COMPUTERS / Social Aspects / Human-Computer Interaction"

I don't believe that this are categories predefined on the ibook store.

iBooks reads the <dc:subject> tag in the epub "contents.opf" file. Unfortunately for most, publishers use all kinds of idosyncratic labels here and it is very annoying (scifi instead of Science Fiction or stories instead of Anthology). If you are saavy enough with epubs, you can alter the content of this tag prior to importing it into iBooks. Not a solution for everyone, granted, but some might find it useful.

I too updated all of my Apple devices and today was the first time an ibook purchase did not sync seamlessly. After reading these threads, the only thing that worked for me (after trying the preferences sync, etc.) was emailing the book to myself, then downloaded it on the other devices.

Hope they find a fix for this, or I'll be forced to go back to printed books.

Holy Zombie Jesus!!!. What the **** have they done to iBooks???. I can no longer drag and drop the books I want to read onto my iPad?. I have to sync them througth iTunes??. WHAT THE FUDGE!!!. Poor form Apple surely their was no need to relaese A half finished app???. did apple get the maps guy to finish iBooks??.

I forgot to mention that if your contents.opf file has more than one <dc:subject> tag, iBooks reads only the first one, that one is the one to change. I just get rid of the others, but some people find it handy to have multiple <dc:subject> tags.

RCB099 wrote:

There must be a lot of frustrated people out there.

Hands down one of the very worst updates I've ever seen from Apple - horrible.

Steve must be rolling in his grave. (Ironically just watched "Jobs" last night...this iBooks app goes against all he stood for, except ways of making $$ from the iStore.)

I had the same thought after seeing the new version of iBooks just updated on my iPad. The whole look and feel of a book has been wiped out and now books are just flat. No way to change the theme back to look like a book.

I guess I really don't understand why Apple has imposed this change on people who have been very happy with iBooks in the past. Apple products used to "just work." With all these problems with iBooks, I feel somewhat betrayed by Apple.

Yes, there seem to have been some retrograde changes in Apple software of late. Some cynical person earlier suggested that the team who wrote iBooks is the same team who wrote Maps. Personally, I think it is more likely that the team are retired Microsoft writers. The old Evil Empire of MS worked hard at preventing, not facilitating, cross-platform communication, and was more focused on locking in customers than providing a user friendly experience. Remind you of anyone lately? The sad part is that early Apple superiority in user friendly software engendered a very loyal tribe of followers and promoters. It's one reason why Apple eventually came to dominate, despite some canny marketing strategies from Bill Gates. I fear for Apple's future if they can't rediscover their earlier customer focused mojo.

Well, very sadly, I share all of these comments and would have some more to add. The "problems" are not limited to Mac software, but they are rapidly (it seems) extending to iPad and other portable devices. However, I believe that crying among orrselves will not produce any reaction from Apple. At least after so many weeks no "rumors" are around that they begin awakening and correct the undergrading "upgrades".

I would propose to organize collecting the largest amount of signatures to a "public protest letter" and forward the hottest letter of disappointment to Apple, addressed to the highest level possible. Even the specialized mass media could also be informed. I can't believe Apple would ignore the real risk of loosing its clients (I'm one of those since 1989!) as well as their money, after all.

Is there anyone having suggestion as to the most effective way to do it? I would immediately subscribe to such an inirtiative.

What if we all just wrote a one-line email to mossberg@wsj.com telling him to please go to Apple discussions and check out how much people like iBooks for Mac. In fact, send the email to him every day. Eventually someone will notice.

I did a clean reinstall of everything back to Mountain Lion, but I think the new iBooks for my iPad just wiped out all of my bookmarks, btw.

Bob