I've updated to Mavericks and was trying to find the epub file for a certain non-Apple Store book in my library. Previously, I would go to iTunes, right click on the file, and do show in Finder. So that's not working, everything is in iBooks now. iBooks apparently does not want to show you where the files are or give you any way to save or move them. After some sleuthing, I found my books files in the cryptically located /Users/gene/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books.
OK, I can open up the plist file in there and figure out which uninformative file name goes with which book. But then I made the mistake of opening up one of the books in iBooks while I was trying to find where the file was. In the process, iBooks converted my perfectly good epub file to a folder containing an OEBPS folder which is apparently the Open eBooks format and the original epub file is gone. My initial google search didn't find a good way of converting this OEBPS folder back to an ePub file, but I will try some more.
So, this is a warning to people who want to be able to access their ePub files outside of iBooks. Copy your files someplace safe before accessing them in iBooks!
UPDATE: It turns out that the folders that iBooks converts to, the ones that contain the OEBPS folders, are actually expanded ePub files. To convert them back to a useable format for other applications, open up the ePub folder in the directory listed earlier, select all the files, right-click, and choose "Compress n items...". Take the resulting zip file, and change the extension from .zip to .epub, and you should be good to go.
OK, I can open up the plist file in there and figure out which uninformative file name goes with which book. But then I made the mistake of opening up one of the books in iBooks while I was trying to find where the file was. In the process, iBooks converted my perfectly good epub file to a folder containing an OEBPS folder which is apparently the Open eBooks format and the original epub file is gone. My initial google search didn't find a good way of converting this OEBPS folder back to an ePub file, but I will try some more.
So, this is a warning to people who want to be able to access their ePub files outside of iBooks. Copy your files someplace safe before accessing them in iBooks!
UPDATE: It turns out that the folders that iBooks converts to, the ones that contain the OEBPS folders, are actually expanded ePub files. To convert them back to a useable format for other applications, open up the ePub folder in the directory listed earlier, select all the files, right-click, and choose "Compress n items...". Take the resulting zip file, and change the extension from .zip to .epub, and you should be good to go.
Last edited: