Calibre + iBooks under Mavericks

[stormerider]

Apologies if this is addressed elsewhere, but I haven't come across it. Upgrading OSX to Mavericks has migrated ebooks from iTunes to the new iBooks app, which iTunes then pulls from when syncing books to an iPad. Does anyone have a working setup for this path? Downside of being an early adopter and all that, but that's what I tend to do, and I'm good at waiting for fixes when non-critical stuff breaks (and since I can handle things manually at the moment, this definitely qualifies as non-critical).

I'm wondering if it's as simple as doing a "Connect to folder" to push it into iBooks, and then triggering a manual sync via iTunes, but I really haven't had the time to dig deeply into this scenario yet, and wanted to check and see if this ground has already been covered by someone else first. Ideally the iDevice plugin would find a new way to function and automate this to communicate directly with the iPad again, but I imagine that's going to take a while to sort out.

I apologize if this post was rambly or unclear, as I'm dealing with a bad migraine at the moment and trying to distract myself while waiting for meds to kick in. Thanks for any help you folks can offer, I always appreciate it.

[sdow1]

I don't have an actual solution (I'll leave that to the more technical minds on the forum), but a brief workaround until it gets sorted is that the new iBooks application allows you to add books (File-->Add to Library). I did this yesterday and added a book I wanted from where it were stored on my computer in my calibre library.

Obviously not a long-term solution, particularly with a big library (since you have to go inside each ebook file to find the .epub file), but it's a short-term option if you're just looking to get a book onto your ipad/iphone/ipod/etc. so that you can read it until a real solution is figured out.

[stormerider]

Thanks, I had figured that much out, which is why I was suspecting that the nearer term solution might involve "connect to folder", and why I'm not too worried since I can handle updates in the short term. Long term, when I go on a book buying spree (or the wife does ), having a less manual solution is going to be very helpful. But thanks for the reply!

[stormerider]

So the iBooks library seems to be stored in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books; I'll try doing a "Connect to folder" with that in the future and see if that does the trick. Everything I have at the moment is already pushed into iBooks, however, so I don't have anything to test with right this moment.

[stormerider]

Ok, so the trick seems to be doing Connect to Folder with that path, then configuring the device to not use subdirectories. After that, you can send books to the "main memory" of the folder and they will appear in iBooks at the next start.

Hope that helps someone else, and especially a plugin developer!

[Ross Smith]

The easy way to handle this is to create a smart folder (saved search) for your new books.

Open your Calibre folder in Finder, and hit Cmd+Option+N to create a new smart folder. Add two criteria: "Name ends with .epub" and "Last modified date is within last 7 days" (or whatever period you want). Save this somewhere convenient.

Whenever you add new books to Calibre, open the smart folder and it will show your latest books. You can just drag and drop them from there to iBooks.

(If your search in the Calibre folder isn't showing any epubs, you may need to get Spotlight to re-index the folder. See http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409)

[paul55391]

Mavericks has a new iBooks app, and iTunes no longer is the repository for eBooks. I just start up the calibre and iBooks apps and click-and-drag books from calibre to iBooks. iTunes is still used to sync with my iPads, except that now iTunes just pulls books from the repository maintained by iBooks.

[NillaGoon]

Originally Posted by stormerider

Ok, so the trick seems to be doing Connect to Folder with that path (~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books), then configuring the device to not use subdirectories. After that, you can send books to the "main memory" of the folder and they will appear in iBooks at the next start.

This is working pretty well for me, at least as a stopgap. A few points:

1) You must start or restart iBooks to have the new titles recognized by iBooks and synced to devices. Evidently, iTunes reads iBooks' internal database information rather than looking directly at the contents of the Books folder.

2) You cannot delete titles from iBooks by using Calibre's "Remove matching books from device" command. That will indeed remove the book file from the Books directory. However, iBooks' internal database entry remains, and iBooks continues to show the book in the library. To remove a book, select it in iBooks, delete it there, and then reconnect Calibre to the Books directory to refresh Calibre's information.

3) It looks like you only get once chance to add a book to iBooks this way. Some information appears to remain cached even after a book is deleted. So if you remove a book and then re-add it, iBooks will just disregard it the second time.


Edit: Now it's not working for me at all - books added through Calibre aren't picked up by iBooks, even after a reboot. How strange... And any books manually added to iBooks are unrecognizable to Calibre; it won't see them as copies of items from the Calibre library.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by NillaGoon

Edit: Now it's not working for me at all - books added through Calibre aren't picked up by iBooks, even after a reboot. How strange... And any books manually added to iBooks are unrecognizable to Calibre; it won't see them as copies of items from the Calibre library.

FYI, This sticky post from the top of this forum outlines some alternatives to ibooks that work fine with calibre.

[nanoduckie]

anyone tried this yet?
http://www.robertsetiadi.net/love-os...ew-ibooks-app/

In case you need it, here are the steps to remove iBooks app and allow us to manage our ebooks using iTunes again:

1. Open Activity Monitor and kill the bookstoreagent service.

2. Delete the file for that service: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CommerceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/bookstoreagent

3. Use AppCleaner to remove iBooks app completely.

4. Restart iTunes and Books menu will appear again there.

5. Copy our ebook files from our backup back to internal storage. This is mainly for ebook files that we didn’t purchase from iBookstore. Don’t worry about books that we purchased from iBookstore, we can re-download them again.

6. Delete the ebook files from ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books so iTunes library will detect them as missing. Right click for each book, choose “Get Info” and it will ask the location of the file. Point the location to the ebook file that we have restored. Yes it’s probably a long and tiring process especially if we have plenty of books.

7. An alternative way of step 6 is to delete all the books from iTunes library and re-import them from the files. All the metadata we created before should remain unchanged.

8. Re-download books that we purchased from iBookstore. Or alternatively if we have those books in our iPhone or iPad, we can just sync them with iTunes and choose to transfer those books.

[paul55391]

Moving books to your iPad actually got EASIER with Mavericks. Apple released a new app, iBooks, for Mavericks. With both calibre and iBooks running, all you have to do in calibre is select the books you want to move and drag them to the iBooks window. To sync iBooks with your iOS device (iPad/iPhone) you use iTunes as always. iTunes manages the movement of books from the folder maintained by iBooks to your device. That's all there is to it. Just forget about the "loss" of the "Connect to iTunes" command in calibre; YOU DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE!

[Neil]

Originally Posted by paul55391

Moving books to your iPad actually got EASIER with Mavericks. Apple released a new app, iBooks, for Mavericks. With both calibre and iBooks running, all you have to do in calibre is select the books you want to move and drag them to the iBooks window. To sync iBooks with your iOS device (iPad/iPhone) you use iTunes as always. iTunes manages the movement of books from the folder maintained by iBooks to your device. That's all there is to it. Just forget about the "loss" of the "Connect to iTunes" command in calibre; YOU DON'T NEED IT ANYMORE!

That works very well, thanks!

[NillaGoon]

Originally Posted by paul55391

Moving books to your iPad actually got EASIER with Mavericks...select the books you want to move and drag them to the iBooks window.

Works great, thanks!

Unfortunately, this method seems to have the same drawback as (the admittedly more complicated) Connect to Folder method: iBooks renames the book file, and Calibre then can't recognize the book as an iBooks copy of something it already has in its library.

I would imagine there are plenty of Calibre users for whom this isn't an issue. But since I don't have all my Calibre books installed on my iPad, it does present a management issue for me. If possible, I'd prefer to keep Calibre as the authoritative "my books" library and be able to continue to see what's been synced to the iPad and what hasn't.

[paul55391]

True, iBooks converts the .epub file names to some "strange" character sequence. I don't know if Apple has publicly documented this but, assuming the mapping function is known, calibre can simply implement the same mapping function.

I personally don't care if calibre knows what I have on my iPad. I just look on my iPad to see what I've got there, and if I want something additional I just click-drag it from calibre to iBooks. When I don't need a book on my iPad anymore, I just delete it in iBooks and sync with the iPad without doing anything in calibre. calibre still manages my master collection of books, and I haven't seen the need for calibre to know what's actually on the iPad.

[paul55391]

I should add that I think calibre is an absolutely fantastic program, with outstanding features, and Apple would benefit greatly by incorporating them into iBooks or explicitly support calibre.