iBooks not importing into Bookpedia

[FineWine]

When I select books (all or individually) in the new Mavericks iBooks App and drag them over the Bookpedia icon in the Dock I get the little red numbered circle and Bookpedia's icon pulses but they do not appear in Bookpedia after cursor release.

No Console Logs

Cheers

[elysdir]

I've had partial success by dragging a folder from the Finder: Go to your home directory, then Library, Containers, com.apple.BKAgentService, Data, Documents, iBooks, Books. Then drag that Books folder to Bookpedia's Dock icon. It imports everything, but a lot of the imported books don't have titles, just the cryptic ID strings that iBooks assigns to them. So this isn't really a fix, just a partial workaround.

Bookpedia folks, any thoughts on how best to import iBooks books?

[Conor]

iBooks now has a tendency to save some of the EPUB files without compression and still label the folder .epub. I have adapted Bookpedia so that it can handle regular folders and read them as if they had been compressed EPUB files. I believe these are the ones you were getting the number title for as it was not finding the correct layout. Do try the Bookpedia beta out, if you get any titles not importing do email me that specific file and I can take a look directly at that particular EPUB and get any enhancements in for the next version.

Sadly iBooks has no AppleScript that I could ask for the information directly as seen by iBooks nor an XML export. Also their .plist file in the container that list the books information tends to be terse on details, although they have improved the details for recent books bought from the iBook store. Could be an option in a future release.

[FineWine]

This really is becoming a pain. I followed elysdir's suggestion but that made a lot of duplicate entries. Apples epub folder numbers are meaningless.

I just bought three Tom Clancy's books (his last prior to his death) and I can not be bothered going through: \Users\***********\Library\Containers\com.apple.BKAgentService\Data\Documents\iBooks\Books\********.epub and clicking on the cover jpeg image to find them and drag them over the Bookpedia icon.

Is there no way you can code to drag them straight out of iBooks onto the Dock icon?

Cheers

[Conor]

You should have been presented with an option to "skip" duplicates. It should have detected duplicates unless of course iBooks is more evil than I thought and has changed the file path on the EPUBs in the meantime.

iBooks won't pass the data on a drag to any other program but itself and when it detects the release over the Finder it will sometimes create a file, depending on the original file. iBooks is quite an unfriendly piece of software when it comes to sharing data or even letting users edit the data. Hopefully future version will at least add AppleScript support/ Export/ Drag or some other form of interaction to make it easier to work with.

In the meantime drag the books out to the Desktop from iBooks, it will create a copy of the EPUB. Then drag those into Bookpedia for importing and then remove the files. It won't have the correct link, but at least you will have the information. If you are using the links from Bookpedia to view the books then I do not recommend this method. You would need to find the original file,the easiest would be to open the "Books.plist" file that is also in the "\Library\Containers\com.apple.BKAgentService\Data\Documents\iBooks\Books\" as it contains a listing used by iBooks. A search for the title will reveal the unique number that iBooks is using.

I shall look at adding a more streamlined import for iBooks. I'd like to use the Books.plist file above to list possible imports from iBooks, but a more official sharing solution would be ideal as it would not break going forward when Apple starts to make folders inaccessible to all but the original application that created the folder.

[FineWine]

Thanks Conor will look into it again in a few weeks.

Cheers