iBooks is a nice looking ereader but it is pretty terrible especially if you don’t have an iPhone or iPad, it doesn’t want to work with anything else.
There have been a lot of problems with documents disappearing from iCloud and it makes no sense to me to use it anyway why do i want to share my stuff via apple I create a lot of content myself using sigil generally notes and projects and it doesn’t need to be on icloud and apart from that if I want them on my sony ereader android tablet or phone its not happening.
I have used iTunes to create a library share on my nas which is controlled by my macbook, maybe I will switch that out for an old Mac Mini it could just be an external USB drive instead.
The thing is if I want to find any music video or book it is on my nas and every other copy is unimportant.
iTunes is actually pretty good at managing media if i use the nas shared library i can import books to the machines local library and i can drag and drop onto the android file transfer app as needed
Itunes lets you rename reclassify and organise pretty easily sometimes you might need to change the media type to edit a field but overall its quite good.
With iBooks your ebooks get hidden away
They are now buried inside the user Library folder.
The full path is: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books
The Books.plist there contains itemID values that connect the book titles with their *.epub or *.ibooks names [iBooks 1.2, OS 10.10.5].
unfortunately iBooks renamed them to something meaningless so i hope you have a backup if not the ibook plist will help you id all your books
to be fair i think ibooks has effectively trashed them so you are unlikely to be able to recover them.
copy them out of there but you may not get them back.
Rename itunes in your music folder. your going to have to reimport later.
First of all we need appcleaner https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/ this we will use to get rid of ibooks as much as possible
use this to remove ibooks.app and itunes.app they are protected so you will need to allow protected files to be uninstalled
Then with pacifist https://www.charlessoft.com/
Drag the itunes11.4.dmg on to pacifists window and install contents of Install ITunes
running the itunes installer from the dmg directly doesn’t work theres a missing component.
Once you have itunes 11.4 up and running you can now upgrade normally to iTunes 12.5.3
I expected to need to do more but this seems to be enough to get books into itunes 11.4 Unfortunately i think iBooks has done a good job of trashing all your ebooks as each ebook is now showing up as a folder not an ebook they brought up an error with stanza and calibre maybe sigil can rebuild the epub but this is beyond the scope of this article.
Data organisation generally is pretty poor on computers of all kinds we are left to our own devices to figure out a filing system. Thats what i like about itunes you let it take care of the filing and it gives you a fast interface to your media. Lightroom does the same for photo’s and pictures and there is another application iDocument which I am investigating for filing other document types. I want to get away from the clutter have things where i can find them which is why the central repository on my nas. If I need the files on a machine it is no bother to access them over my lan or drag them on to the machine I am going out with.
If I really need to access stuff while away from home google drive works pretty well and i control what gets uploaded to it, alternatively i have this website and i can drop files on here too. There is no need to have anything and everything available to be snooped on and at best used to advertise stuff you do not really want.
hmm i got ibooks back in itunes 12.5.4 update
- in iBooks, sign out. Store > Sign Out.
- Quit out from iBooks.
- In Terminal, ps -ax | grep -i BKAgentService, and kill -9 the process it finds.
- Navigate to ~/Library/Containers and completely delete com.apple.BKAgentService. You might note that the so call “books that cannot download” actually appear in Data/Documents/iBooks/Books in some form. Deleting them here is pointless. (iBooks has a strange form of memory that will keep accessing the current state even after you delete this container, which is the biggest pain.)
- Finally, (and I do know this is the final step), reboot. Do not log out/in or anything like that. Do the full reboot cycle.
sudo mv /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BookKit.framework/Versions/A/XPCServices/com.apple.BKAgentService.xpc/Contents/MacOS/com.apple.BKAgentService{,-disabled}
Library cache bookstore agent delete
Ebook readers.
I am still looking for a good ebook reader i really do not need one that copies ebooks into a database my ebooks are already in a database called iTunes. Looking around it seems most ebook readers are based on readium code. Even adobe digital editions which supports drm’d ebooks has readium within its code base. Browser based readers seem to work quite well. Others well let say fake pine and book page style readers are not really much good. I would rather they managed to keep all the words on the page visible and scale the images to fit within the page.
http://www.epubread.com/app/en/ this isn’t too bad
Or look here for some alternatives http://readium.github.io/applications/[/nk_awb]
