Every Single Problem with iBooks for Mac

I just grabbed Marvin recently myself ... it doesn't take PDFs for some reason. To add them, you have to convert them to ePub in Calibre.

And yes, trying workarounds for the disfunctional iBooks is a head spinner.

Yes, that is the convenient thing about iBooks when it used to work, or when if it works again ... it takes most formats.

Adding books to the iPad is a clunky system whether it is iTunes or Calibre. But at least Calibre is a versatile system that also converts material into different formats.

Well, I'm really upset with the endless story of iBook' problems.

Tried a lot of times to change somenthing, but every time I thought that a problem was cared, other problems arose... it's really unbelievable. I spent most of last two weeks in unsuccessful trials. Eventually - too late - I had the courage to stop: abandoned the stupid new iTunes; deleted iBooks from my Mac; copied a bakup copy of all my books (as they really were) to a folder of my choice, outside the idiosyncrasies of the new system; bought BookReader to read them on Mac; bought Marvin for iPad; synced Mac to Marvin by USB; deleted the unreadable cryptic iBook files; saved 1.7 gigabytes of disk space... oh, everything OK?

Not completely. I've 4,300+ books and a not insignificant bunch of purchased epubs from any vendors I liked, all personally made: for almost all of them (why not simply "all"? another good question to Apple) their metadata were scrambled around sometimes (again not all!) even with their title! Would you imagine how long does it take to correct them? I spent 4 days to correct a miserable 25%.

So friends, STOP CRYING! Take your courage and write a strong claim to Apple. I've just made it, here it is:

Hope that many of you would do the same. Stop crying and protest. Good luck.

I agree with the others. The iBooks is awful. It makes it much harder for me to work with and to do what I have been doing all along. I have a lot of PDF files, etc that I have imported. I buy NO books so it is all my own stuff. In the past I was able to look at the directory in itunes (in windows 7) that had all the books. I could add and cheange the names, dates, etc. I could copy them to a flash drive to bring to other computers. Now I can't do any of that anymore. I can't change anything. I can't copy easily. I have to do all corrections on the file before dropping it into iBooks.If after, I have to move the file to finder, make my corrrections, delete it in iBooks and then move the renamed file back in. Plus it is exceptionally ugly now. I hate the new format. Yuck.

I find the same thing with the movies. Editing is much harder there as well.

Wozzeck wrote:

Kill it with fire. Here are the instructions I followed to both nuke iBooks from orbit and restore iTunes to previous epub and pdf handling capabilities:

1.) Kill the bookstoreagent service using the Activity Monitor.

2.) Delete the file for that service: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CommerceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/bo okstoreagent

3.) Use AppCleaner to get rid of iBooks.

4.) Restart iTunes and you will find the Books tag return under library.

5.) Import your books again with all the metadata intact.

On my machine, I found that I not only had to restart iTunes, but also had to log out of my account and then log back in. The good news is that once I did so, iBooks was dead and gone and iTunes was working properly again. I'd like to find whoever did the Quality Control for iBooks and kick them repeatedly in the genitals.

Many thanks Mr. Wozzeck for this tip! Simple and effective. All you people are right - iBooks has to go down in history as the worst ever ****-up software-wise. There didn't seem to be one single thing that was better than before! Not my problem anymore since I managed to revert back to using iTunes. iBooks managed to wipe out my book data from iTunes though, so now I have the following dilemma:

My iPad is happily loaded with my books (over 1000 of them), tidily and painstakingly arranged to about 20-25 collections. I have all the books on my harddrive backed up, but not on iTunes because iBooks (thanks again Apple!). So now if I sync the iPad I have reason to fear that, rather than syncing my existing books from the iPad to the empty bookshelf that is my iTunes, it will wipe out all the books from the iPad. One of the biggest reasons for this belief is that this is Apple's law - which option would the user prefer? Let's go with the worse one - the one where all the books are wiped out, yeah! Anyways, the colourful bar that indicates how full the iPad is seems to indicate this possibility since I remember that the iPad was/is about 90% full and now it shows to be (if I sync) at something like 60%.

I can of course go through the whole process of putting my books on iTunes and then arranging them into collections again - only that I have better things to do. Anybody have any idea if there's a possibility of syncing my books from the full iPad to the empty iTunes and not vice versa?

Thanks for the tips everyone, these forums are a lifesaver when the ****** rotten apple inevitably hits the fan. One endnote: I hope Apple completely redesigns iBooks - in principle I dug that my books were in a different place from my music.

I found another way to acess some of my ibooks. I had to e-mail them to myself and it ended up emailed as a zip file so I downloaded a Izip app first, but I finally got it. Does anyone else do this or is it easier a diffrent way?

Open finder and from the Favorites sidebar click on: Music>iTunes>iTunes Media>Books

Another point to be made is that the updated version of iBooks on the iPad itself should be avoided. It takes a while to "turn on" unlike its predecessor, and crashes frequently. Just today, while reading a book on the bus I got the equivalent of a kernel panic crash, when the screen dimmed left to right as if a shower curtain were being drawn closed. The device turned itself back on in a couple of minutes.

Doug Holm1 wrote:

Another point to be made is that the updated version of iBooks on the iPad itself should be avoided. It takes a while to "turn on" unlike its predecessor, and crashes frequently. Just today, while reading a book on the bus I got the equivalent of a kernel panic crash, when the screen dimmed left to right as if a shower curtain were being drawn closed. The device turned itself back on in a couple of minutes.

The iPad iBooks seemed almost unusable to me a while ago, it could take a couple of minutes to perform an action, like opening a book. Then I had an idea and closed down most of my other apps that were running in the background (there were lots of them) - now it runs smoothly enough.

They don't respond but they do read. These forums are provided for user to user support (which means users do the work while alleviating company technical support workload) and, more importantly, for information to flow to the company from people who are using (and in some cases) manipulating the product.

Here is how to delete iBooks and get book management functionality back to iTunes (just like it was before):

1. Open Activity Monitor and kill the bookstoreagent service.

2. Delete the file for that service:/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CommerceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/boo kstoreagent

3. Use AppCleaner to remove iBooks app completely.

4. Restart iTunes and Books menu will appear again there.

5. Copy our ebook files from our backup back to internal storage. This is mainly for ebook files that we didn’t purchase from iBookstore. Don’t worry about books that we purchased from iBookstore, we can re-download them again.

6. Delete the ebook files from~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Booksso iTunes library will detect them as missing. Right click for each book, choose “Get Info” and it will ask the location of the file. Point the location to the ebook file that we have restored. Yes it’s probably a long and tiring process especially if we have plenty of books.

7. An alternative way of step 6 is to delete all the books from iTunes library and re-import them from the files. All the metadata we created before should remain unchanged.

8. Re-download books that we purchased from iBookstore. Or alternatively if we have those books in our iPhone or iPad, we can just sync them with iTunes and choose to transfer those books.

Hello,

Is there also a way to transfer back ePUB and PDFs from an iPad back to iTunes. I tried with a file browsing application, but I will loose metadata and file names are encrypted. Is there a third party application doing the trick that you can recommend?

Cheers

Luca

When you sync your iPad to your Mac, any books and PDFs on your iPad should sync to your Books library. Navigate to to [user]/iTunes/iTunes Media/Books in your home folder and the PDFs should be there. If they're not, go to File > Devices > Transfer Purchases from [user]'s iPad.

You can also email documents to yourself from iBooks on your iPad.

If you have an app like GoodReader or DropBox, they can transfer PDFs back and forth from your iPad but you first have to upload them to the app.

Hi Tincha,

thank you for you answer. I manage my book library manually, therefore syncing the books will eventually overwrite what I have on the iPad. I could use dropbox or GoodReader, but it's a library with around 3000 pdf files. Transferring each file manually is simply not practical.

I remember few years ago there was a specific OS X application that was enabling to copy the iOS device media to a Mac, without losing file names and metadata. Unfortunaltely I cannot remember the name.

Cheers

Luca

S_eye, from your posts I assume you use the highly criticized iBook for Mac. Besides many other serious problems, its handling of PDFs is the worst I've ever seen.

Two apps can transfer files from iPad to Mac: "iCopyBot" and "File Transfer". Search for them in Macupdate. I prefer the first, easier to use. However, I can't be certain they will keep "your" metadata safe since there is no standard for them. You might try whith one or two files and see what happens. If this works for you, I would suggest to copy back to mac your files, then remove PDFs from iBook both in iPad and iBook for Mac, and reverse them to an iPad app (there are many, I use BookMan) capable to be synced via iTunes in the "App" section of the iTunes sync page. Old way, but certainly much better than iBook so-called book management.

If this doesn't work, I've painfully learned by experience NOT TO USE AT ALL iBook for Mac that I deleted from my system. If you do it carefully, your files will reappear in iTunes, which will again show them in a Book section as they were.

If this is just a one-time transfer of 3000 files, you could temporarily turn off manually managing for a one-time synch of your iPad. This will transfer the files to your Mac. You can verify they are there by clicking on the Books tab and the PDF's should show up there. Then when you are done, turn manually manage back on.