Apple Releases iBooks 1.0.1 for Mac With Bug Fixes, Stability Improvements

[DrKarl]

1.0.1 doesn't let me view/download any book!?

The version 1.0.1 update broke iBooks on my Mac Pro ... I was able to download and view books with 1.0, but with 1.0.1, double-clicking any previously downloaded book asks for my iTunes password, which I give, and then nothing happens.

Double-clicking a free/public domain book opens the book without problems.

Clicking the "iBooks Store" button correctly shows my account info. So, something seems hosed with the digital rights management and/or iCloud etc.

Double-clicking a book still in the cloud changes the book icon to pastel colors and shows the start of the progress bar and then gives a message "An unknown error has occured" cancel/retry. Retry just gives the same message.

I reported all of this via 'feedback', but am curious if anyone else has had issues or has an idea of how to fix this? I may try deleting any iBooks preferences that I can find...

 

[blackboxxx]

Seems to me like quite a lots of steps to sync PDF and it's a bit counter-intuitive. Why can't I just "save" my PDF or (non-iTunes) ebooks on my iCloud directly form iBooks, like any TextEdit document for example? Then I could just open them from any iOS device and they would always be in-sync.

That wouldn't be a "magical" solution but it seems to me that it would be quicker and in some ways, more logical.

You may be onto something here. Currently, you can save PDFs to iCloud from Preview.app, but they are not accessible from iOS devices. Likewise, you can open PDFs in iBooks on iOS, but they don't sync.

Seems like a no-brainer to link the two.

 

[dstankus]

iBooks strikes me as a possibly good idea if you only have books that you bought from Apple. If you have a variety of non-Apple-purchased books, I don't see what the advantage is, and they should really give you the option of using iBooks or not.

 

[iOrbit]

this appears to have fixed my bug in iBooks which hid my entire books collection!

 

[Mahler12x]

iBooks strikes me as a possibly good idea if you only have books that you bought from Apple. If you have a variety of non-Apple-purchased books, I don't see what the advantage is, and they should really give you the option of using iBooks or not.

Well, ultimately you still have a choice between using iBooks, Kindle, or other apps on your devices to read books. I think you might be complaining more about the fact that the books you purchase online are proprietary to only one app or the other, and I completely agree.

I'd prefer to use iBooks for ALL my book reading, but what happens when you've got stuff purchased on Amazon? Or maybe the book you want is cheaper on Amazon than iTunes? Well, the hard truth is that the reason people have and will continue to pirate is because piracy offers a better product. It's as simple as that. I've de-DRM'd my Kindle library so that I can convert em to ePubs and put em with my iBooks library. Is it legal? No. But that's the way it goes.

 

[Gudi]

iBooks strikes me as a possibly good idea if you only have books that you bought from Apple. If you have a variety of non-Apple-purchased books, I don't see what the advantage is, and they should really give you the option of using iBooks or not.

I've already read a variety of non-purchased books in .epub format with iBooks for Mavericks. And of course I always have the option to use another application that supports this open file format. Any suggestions for third party alternatives with syncing or metadata editing features?

 

[RobertoCravallo]

Anybody but me still having problems with MAIL and GMAIL?

The rules still don't work for me.

Furthermore I send backup files from my phone to my mailaccount and this works fine. Since I am the sender I am the sender and receipient (same emailadress) of the mail. In the previous version of MAIL, the rule moved these files for me and marked them as read. After a while I would delete the files (3 of them) from the in-box. With the "new" MAIL and the update, when I delete these three files from the in-box, the moved files also "disappear" from the directory I moved them to. That sure sucks and it took me a while to figure out, where my backups went!!!

Dangerous territory here, as my back ups are deleted?? by APPLE MAIL?

 

[RobertoCravallo]

Mail

Sorry, mistakenly double posted!

 

[hansrb]

iBooks for Mavericks is half-baked

I've a raving fan of Apple since the early 80s.

But iBooks seems to be THE most half-baked product that Apple have ever let out the door in a very long time.

Why not simply mimic what iTunes does with music, especially for adding metadata and book covers to one's existing collections?

"command-I" should be just as effective in iBooks as it is in iTunes.
Are these teams so silo-ed that they can't learn from each other?

And why hide the book titles deep in the bowels of iTunes files?

It's not a fun product to use, although some features, like formatting options, are vintage quality Apple.

We hope you hear us in the iBooks team, and release a better version soon.

 

[jjhoekstra]

My guess is that collection syncing only works with books purchased from iBook Store because Apple doesn't offer "iTunes Match" equivalent for iBooks, unlike Google that allows you to upload your books to their cloud and access them from any device.

You guess wrong. All readable books in iBooks, including bought from iTunes and downloaded PDFs/epubs, sync to iOS devices via iCloud. I had a similar issue and in the end it resulted from to of my iOS devices having the same name. I solved it by doing new setup of one of the devices from backup, but with a new name, and de- and re- authorizing the devices. Syncing then worked fine for all files in iBooks in both directions.

 

[blackboxxx]

You guess wrong. All readable books in iBooks, including bought from iTunes and downloaded PDFs/epubs, sync to iOS devices via iCloud. I had a similar issue and in the end it resulted from to of my iOS devices having the same name. I solved it by doing new setup of one of the devices from backup, but with a new name, and de- and re- authorizing the devices. Syncing then worked fine for all files in iBooks in both directions.

Ok, let's do a little experiment then. Turn on collection syncing, then add a non-iTunes epub or PDF to iBooks on OS X. When you open iOS iBooks, can you find it there?
The answer is you can't. That's because Apple doesn't store your epubs/pdfs in iCloud. All "collection syncing" does is allow you to organise your books into categories and these category names will sync to your other devices through iCloud, but it still requires that you add the files to iBooks on each device (manually via Safari, Mail, Dropbox or by syncing through iTunes).