[eroux]

On iPadOS 16 Apple's "Books" app is a somewhat... suboptimal?... experience.

I have decided to get all of my books out of it, which of couse means I wasn't keen to drag-'n-drop more than a thousand times. So I have taken pdurrant's Apple script and extracted the commands into the following Shell Script, which I called ePubFolder2File and saved into my path:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

main_loop()
{
    opts=':';
    while getopts ${opts} opt; do
        case "${opt}" in
            [?]|*)
                echo "usage: $(basename "$0") EPUB_FOLDER" >&2
                exit 1;
            ;;
        esac
    done
    shift $((OPTIND - 1));

    while [[ "$1" != "" ]]; do
        build_epub "${1}"
        shift;
    done
}

build_epub ()
{
    local source_folder="$1"
    local dest_file
    local current_dir=$(pwd)

    dest_file="$(basename "${source_folder%.epub}").epub"

    if [[ $(dirname "${source_folder}") == "." ]] && [[ "${source_folder}" != "${source_folder%.epub}" ]]; then
        source_folder="${source_folder%.epub}"
        mv "${source_folder}.epub" "${source_folder}"
    fi

    cd "${source_folder}" || exit 1
    zip --quiet -X0 "${current_dir}/${dest_file}" mimetype
    zip --quiet -rDX9 "${current_dir}/${dest_file}" * -x "*.DS_Store" -x mimetype
}

main_loop "$@"

I used it like follows from my shell to get all of my ePubs into a sane format:

$ find "/Users/eroux/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/Documents" -type d -name \*.epub | 
    while read epubdir; do 
        if [[ ! -f  $(basename "$epubdir") ]]; then 
            echo "Processing $(basename $epubdir)"; 
            ePubFolder2File "$epubdir"; 
        fi;
    done

It took a couple of minutes, but now I can move them to a new reader.