How to undo an iBooks conversion and revert back to iTunes

Hi,

I just upgraded to Yosemite 10.10.1 and I have iTunes 12.0.1. I erased iBooks as explained on the steps but I have no backup from my old library from iTunes. I just have the ebooks on a folder on an external disc and the Book icon is not appearing on my iTunes. What can I do?

Any help will be very appreciated, I have no idea what to do

Thanks.

Gime

Yep. it's a bl**dy nuisance isn't it. 😉

I've set up Simon (http://www.dejal.com/simon/) to monitor the various things that iBooks messes with and then alert me! Currently my 'fix list' is:

1. quit iTunes
2. kill the process com.apple.BKAgentService
3. delete /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BookKit.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/com. apple.BKAgentService.xpc
4. use appzapper to remove iBooks
5. delete ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService
6. delete ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX
7. empty the trash
8. restart iTunes

Books should be accessible again!

Steps 5 & 6 are new, this caught me out after the 10.10 upgrade.

My current 'Simon' checks, so I get alerted if iBooks tries to come back...

Thank you Mark and StoneSoup !

When will they ever learn at Apple and get that horrible iBooks implementation back into iTunes for where it is expected to be. I will never understand and agree with that blockheads at Apple who decided to take the ebooks and pdf's out of that iTunes and tearing it apart from audiobooks and the rest of the media.

I run into a mess this time too after updating Yosemite. I still forgot to care about it. After restoring my iTunes library files I finally managed to get it right again.

I have been able to follow all these steps except the "delete iBooks" step.

It appears that iBooks is 'locked' and "cannot be modified or removed because it's required by OS X".

I completed all the other steps and have found that iTunes is still not respecting my efforts.

I cannot use iBooks anymore even if I wanted to... so what sort of a pickle am I in?

is there a hack to remove iBooks regardless of the "locked" state it's in?

Yep. As I said in my last post, I set-up 'Simon' to monitor my iBooks stuff and of course after the upgrade it all went red, but I followed the few steps from my last post and as I did - each check went green and after a few minutes work all is well again and iBooks is no more.

What a relief!

(The containers were back again as well, but thankfully I knew to zap them this time so everything was fine).

Sorry, missed this.

Glad you managed to sort it though, I'm replying here just for completeness.

Stonesoup is correct, you might have to tell zapper not to protect apple apps (I do). I think you also must have killed the service first otherwise it will get ratty. Assuming that you do both of those then you should be fine and iBooks should be a distant memory in no time ;-)

I'll tweak my post with the summary to note this just so it's all in one place. - Actually I won't - it won't let me edit it any more. *sigh*

There is an option in AppZapper to 'protect apple apps', you may need to turn this off to be able to delete iBooks.

Thanks so much for your input Mark

I am now running 10.10.3 and iTune 12.1.2.27 and have returned both my epubs and my PDFs to iTunes.

I have extra question though.

If i look in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

my epubs and PDFs are also located there.

Are these copies? Should i delete this folder also?

If so, which folder exactly?

Thanks in advance, maybe I missed a step...??

In iTunes, select a book/PDF, right click it and show in finder. Make sure that all the books/PDF's are shown in that location and that it isn't the container directory!

If everything is okay then delete the container directory, but I would suggest first that you close iTunes, compress that container directory and move the zip file somewhere safe. Then re-open iTunes and check that everything is still there and accessible.

My main issue with iBooks is that it copies my files to that directory which has to be on the internal System disk. I don't have that kind of space to waste. So, yes, they *SHOULD* be just copies but it doesn't hurt to make sure first ;-)

checked them out and the EPUBs were in the Container Folder, but all my PDF's were located in the iTunes Media folder, which was a bit weird.

So I deleted the ones from the Container Folder and re-imported from another source and lo and behold they are stored now in the iTunes folder! 🙂

Can I safely delete this folder now? ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books? If so, what do I delete? /iBooks/Books or more than that? Do I delete all the way back to com.apple.BKAgentService? I'm not sure if it is still needed.