how to rename an item (e.g. PDF) in Mavericks (10.9) iBooks (1.0.1)

Tested and working:

How to edit iBooks meta data under Mac OS X Mavericks

First of all, I GOT THIS FROM ANOTHER SOURCE. I take no credit nor responsibility.

IT WORKS

Edit metadata with Calibre for Mac

Although edit metadata with iBooks is impossible, it doesn't mean this is the end of the story. With another software, Calibre for Mac, we can edit book's metadata then load the book into iBooks for Mac app.

First we import the book into Calibre and delete it from iBooks

Right click on the book title, choose "Edit metadata", then "Edit metadata individually".

In this window we can customize almost all the important metadata, including adding a cover to the book

After you finish the editing, click "OK" to confirm.

But job is not finished yet, in fact the editing is only done in Calibre's library. To display the edited book in iBooks for Mac, we need add the editing into the book file.

No matter if we are adding cover or modifying other metadata like title, author & publisher, genre, etc. , converting the book to EPUB again is necessary, only in this way, we can completely edit the metadata inside the book, not only in Calibre library.

So the last step is to convert the book to EPUB, even this file is already an EPUB file.

Find the converted file in Calibre's library and drag it into iBooks for Mac, now we can see the book displayed in iBooks for Mac with all the gorgeous editing present.

Using the same method we can also add or modify other metadata like title, author & publisher, genre, etc. on Mac OS X Mavericks even the iBooks for Mac won't permit us to do so.

I have tried this and it works!!!

Why do you write so big ?

old tired eyes require composing in 14pt and i forgot to smallify the message before submitting

Sadly, with this brand-new iBooks you can't neither change the names of the files nor the metadata ( name is part of metadata ). There are solutions to edit the infos ( with third-party apps ) but the are time-consuming. You can find your books well hidden at : /Users/you/Library/Containers/com.apple.MKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Bo oks. Even changing the name there won't affect them in iBooks. I really hope to have an update soon to bring these key features. Without them, iBooks is a joke.

Just got a Mac computer, set up iTunes on it and found the iBooks was no longer part of it but separate. Lost all ability to edit how my books are organised on except for 'Collection'! Thank god I still had my back up Calibre library on external hard drive!!! Your advise works brilliantly! Thank you! Had to find a compatible Calibre download though - I downloaded Calibre version 0.7.28 for Mac. Does anyone know how to edit 'Category' for iBooks? Haven't worked that one out yet 🙂.

If you're just trying to rename PDF files, drag them from ibooks onto your desktop, delete the copy in ibooks, rename the copy on your desktop and drag back into ibooks. It's a pain, but it seems to be the easiest way.

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books

You will find all your ibook files here - ready to be renamed - even deleted

Excellent tip!

I cut & pasted your ~directory listing to Finder>Go, where I found - in Yosemite - all the files in my iBooks collection.

Anything that is not an epub is easily dealt with. You can simply rename the file, and if you can't figure out the name, hit the space bar and it will open the file so you can see what it is.

Epubs are a little different, though. Some of them can be dealt with as above. Evidently, most of them don't need to be renamed - they will have a name like 63B9C755F71D7D9F4BDCD4384F172537.epub but most of them seem to be in iBook format so when you go to iBooks they show up with a reasonable name. (You can't hit the spacebar to get the title for most of these.)

But some of them turn out to be documents I would have thought were pdfs - I get weekly short stories from the Library of America and I save those as pdfs - but evidently a few of those were converted by iBooks to epub format. Or maybe they were files I moved to iBooks after converting them to epub in Calibre. So basically, you have to switch back & forth between iBooks & the directory, first to find the ones that need renaming, then renaming them in the directory.

You can't do anything but change the name - you can't put the author's name in, for example, unless you include it as part of the title.

Also, it takes a while for iBooks to process the changes. I recommend logging out of iBooks for a few minutes, then opening it, and switching between the All Books view and the List view, which seems to give it a kick in the pants if it doesn't want to cooperate.

So...it turns out that you can directly edit titles & authors in the List function of iBooks if you have version 1.2 running in Yosemite. Maybe in Mavericks too, I dunno...