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riontelI didn't think it was possible to develop something more horrible for book management than iTunes but clever developers at Apple squashed my pessimism and came up with iBooks. Since I have to turn in my company laptop I've been working on resurrecting my old MBP. As part of the the process I upgraded it to Mavericks which by default comes with iBooks. Once I ran out of invectives, a quick search yielded a way to wipe out the abomination of iBooks off my computer and to return control of my ebooks to iTunes.
Since I'll have to repeat the process in a couple of weeks, when my new laptop is scheduled to arrive, here are the instructions:
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 application 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/Booksso 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.
Since I'll have to repeat the process in a couple of weeks, when my new laptop is scheduled to arrive, here are the instructions:
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 application 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/Booksso 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.
