Q: Can't access iBooks in El Capitan...

Wanted to add the following to my post but Apple won't save it ... so I'll write it all over again (sigh)

Thanks LWII

my stuff is accessible again in iBooks on my Mac.

Still struggling to sync all books back to my iPad.They do not show up in iTunes. Bought books from the Apple Store can be downloaded until the very end and then iBooks tells it failed to download Emailing the docs to myself and then opening them in iBooks on my iPad is not really an option.

After having filled ibooks by dragging the previous book contents into it they were there although they did not show up in iTunes so I could not sync them back to my iPad. Loading some books directly onto the iPad made them go away again at some stage. Other than that books from the Apple store keep downloading and once completed iBooks tells me it failed.

Well, I'm not amused!

How did you get your books back into iBooks (so they stay there)  so they are recognized by iTunes an can be synced again ?

This is incredibly frustrating - I have the same issue. Upgraded to El Capitan and now I can't access any of my iBooks.

ok, so here is what worked for me:

- refer to LWII's first post where he points to (Re: ibook issue on imacin response to Gnlchef)

  - I had to go through ALL steps

- !!! do NOT drag and drop the files in com.apple.BKAgentService/Documents/iBooks/Books into the iBooks app because (apparently) iTunes will not notice it !!!

- instead use 'File --> Add to Library ... ' in iBooks to add them. iTunes will notice

- select the books you want to sync in iTunes

- sync

The problem with "Add to Library" is that you can only add one (1) book at a time. This is extremely awkward. It is made worse by the fact that books in epub-format got a cryptic name like EFAA1A97E45FAA1BC2363022BD309BAC.epub making it kind of hard to track where you left off.

Took me a long time to get back to where I was before the upgrade to El Capitan. Basically, I wasted a lot of time I could have put to better use.

or you can select all the book you want to sync and open them. iBook will open all the books and automatically sync them to the library. This is much more faster. It worked for me.

Thanks  lidorS,

yes that works very well.

Going through the restored books in iBook I noticed that some epub-books cannot be read. The problem is that I cannot see them in iBooks on El Capitan but on the iPad. I would like to remove them from iBooks so they are not synced to the iPad anymore.

The other problem is that books I purchased are not available on El Capitan. Downloading them does not work since at the very end it fails. Surprisingly I can read them on the iPad.

Very frustrating ...

I don't understand how is it possible that those books you have been using (and books you purchased) , can not be opened in El Capitan.

Did you buy them from iTunes ?

After this fix, all of the books I used are now working perfectly on iBook.

ok, I've been in touch with Apple chatting and talking with them on the phone for 2 hours.

The first suggestion was to delete the iBooks folder. We didn't get to do it because they phoned me and I had a different representative from Apple who wanted to check all sorts of other things. I'm not going into any details because this is a really long story.

Today I went through the problem again on my own. To make it short I found out the following:

Using my regular account downloading already purchased books results in a number of messages being logged to the console:

Obviously, El Capitan broke something. Similar problems are shown on http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/208292/cant-login-in-mac-app-store-or-i cloud-login-loading-forever .

Now, the "weird" thing is, that I can download the books using a different user without problems. Currently it is no option to move everything to a new user since a lot of settings, emails, ... would either be lost or would need to be recreated.

Finding this out took me only 10 minutes. I kind of wonder why Apple didn't ask me for the logs. Instead they suggested that my internet connection is too slow. Well of course it is slow connecting to the Apple servers when there is high load on them and sandboxd tries to download stuff and keeps getting errors.

Wonder when Apple is going to fix this problem.

Followed the detailed steps posted and everything works fine after the first re-start then re-build of my iBooks library. But once I re-start my MBP again the iBooks library reverts to having missing books.

FYI I have around 200 books purchased through Apple, and around 400 DRM free .epub books that prior to El Capitan worked fine in iBooks.

I performed the steps 3 times all with the same results, I'm headed back to Yosemite.

The weird thing is that during the 2 weeks I used El Capitan GM, iBooks worked flawlessly, this only happened when I performed a clean install of El Capitan.

Thank you the troubleshooting help me a lot, now I have an issue with my iCloud and there is something I don't have it clear, do I have to re-download all my libraries? and also my data now is on the desktop? how can I set on the place it was?

Try this solution:

1. Restart your Mac in Recovery Model (command+R).
2. From the OS X menu bar choos Utilities > Terminal.
3. Type 'resetpassword' at the shell prompt. The Reset Password dialog box appears.
4. Select the user (e.g., You) that is having the issue with iBooks from the drop-down.
5. Click the [Reset] button at the bottom to reset permissions and ACLs. The button will change to [Done].
6. Exit the open dialogs and restart normally.
7. In Finder, open the user 'Home' folder and open the Get Info panel.
8. Click the little lock at the bottom right. Enter your password when asked.
9. Click the little gear at the bottom and select 'Apply to enclosed items ...'.
10. Click OK. This can take a minute if you have a lot of files.
11. Launch iBooks. When you get the Library Location: (null) message click the option to reset the library. iBooks should now be happy.
12. Log into the iBooks store to get your purchased books. You should also be able to reimport any PDFs, etc. you had.

Hi folks, the given fix was working for me. Thank you!

If the fix is not working for someone of you  and you are in a rush - you should have a look into the folder :   com.apple.BKAgentService

Go to in finder and paste

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

I have found my eBooks and PDF's in it so i could drag and drop my stuff back into iBooks. If iBooks won't open for you, you can use  an other viewer to access your  content.

Apple  -1 star... for the records

Cheers

iBooks started working on my iMac with El Capitan after I did option (1).  Thanks!