How iBooks determine that two ibooks are identical?

Question

Level 1

8 points

How iBooks determine that two ibooks are identical?

Hi there,

I have 2 very different .ibooks in my laptop but iBooks app (Mac OS El Capitan 10.11.4 and iBooks 11.5) keeps on saying both are identical.

This situation does not allow me to add them to my library so I have to add one, then remove, then add the other one everytime I want to read them.

There has to be something, a file, a particular tag inside a file, etc. iBooks uses to identify this. What is it?

I have read in other threads that recreating the books with iBook Author can solve the problem but is not working for me. I only have the .ibooks package, iBook Author does not allow to import or read these files (I really don't know what type of files iBook Author can open, everything is grey when I select Open...)

Is there a real documentation out there about how to use iBooks in a more advanced way that simply clicking "open in iBooks" in iPhone, drag and drop pdfs to iBooks app, or purchase iBooks from the iTunes Store? I only see the obvious things on apple website....

thanks in advance!

MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4), iBooks 1.5

Posted on May 5, 2016 10:52 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,542 points

May 6, 2016 6:13 AM in response to alberto.gs02

Where did you get these two books exactly?

iBooks Author is only useful for people who have this problem with ebooks which they have themselves created. It cannot help with books created by someone else (it can't do anything with them).

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Answer 2

alberto.gs02 Author

Level 1

8 points

May 6, 2016 7:09 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanx Tom!!

Exactly!, I realized that iBooks Author was not the tool I needed because the iBooks causing the problem were not mine and iBA doesn't even recognise .ibooks to be opened!

To answer your question, the ibooks came from an iTunes University course I'm attending on the iPad.

I had the same problem there, I could only have 1 ibook in iBooks app on the iPad. I needed to delete one .ibook in order to be able to open a different .ibook from the same course. The iPad does not complain about it, it just opens the same ibook all the times, no matter what .ibook you're trying to read from iTunes University. To workaround that, I extracted the iBooks from the iPad (one by one), place them in my Macbook Pro (using iExplorer), and tried to add them to my library in the MacBook, and from there try to use iCloud to have them all at the same time on the iPad Library. It was then, when trying to add both .ibooks to the MacBook Library, when a warning message about both ibooks being identical gave me the clue about what the problem was in the first place on the iPad too...

The question was, and still is, what does iBooks app looks for to determine an iBook is identical from another (forbidding to add it to your library), when they are not only physically different packages/folders, but their sizes, images, etc etc are also different when you compare the contents of an .ibook package/folder with the other.

If I'm able to alter just that, I think I will be able to add all the .ibooks I need to iBooks app so I don't need to delete one to open another!!

Thank you for your help!

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Answer 3

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

122,542 points

May 6, 2016 8:18 AM in response to alberto.gs02

I don't know the answer, but I suspect it must be something in the meta data for the books, presumably some kind of ID. Are they from the same author/publisher? If so, you could try to contact them about it. Also you might ask in the iTunes U forums if you have not already done so:

iTunes U

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Answer 4

alberto.gs02 Author

Level 1

8 points

May 6, 2016 8:57 AM in response to Tom Gewecke

Thanx Tom,

Yes, both ibooks are from the same publisher.

I will ask in the forum you suggested. Maybe is the way iTunes University "passes" the .ibook to iBooks... because in order to be able to extract the .ibooks, I first had to download them in iTunesU, then open them (in iBooks) and from that iPad iBook folder, extract them to the Hard drive... I was not looking at the file in the iTunes University iPad folder... I took it directly from iBooks!

Thanx a lot!

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