The Workaround - Because iBooks 1.0 on Mavericks lacks the Get Info command that iTunes has, you have no way of editing the “genre” for the book to fix it. Consequently, the next time you sync your Mac’s iBooks library with your iPad (and you do that via iTunes, so, even if iTunes wasn’t running when you added your EPUB to iBooks, it can build the file when you sync), the EPUB that you sync to your iPad contains the ist file, and the book shows up on your iPad categorized as Fiction.Īnd that’s why your EPUB is Uncategorized on your Mac but is Fiction on your iPad. However, when iTunes finishes its ist construction project, the EPUB in your iBooks library on the Mac does have the file. And, since the EPUB has no ist, and hence no “genre” entry, at the time the EPUB is assigned to a category, it ends up being categorized as Uncategorized. And here it is: iBooks apparently assigns a newly added EPUB to a category before iTunes has a chance to create the ist file and let iBooks know about it. opf file, the “Fiction” part of the statement becomes the “genre” in the ist file that iTunes creates for the EPUB. So, if the EPUB contains the statement Fiction in its. opf file, scavenge through the metadata as best it can, and use what it finds to create an ist for the EPUB and fill it with data. When you add an EPUB to iBooks from a source other than the iBooks Store, iBooks sends out a call to iTunes to look into the EPUB’s. Before Mavericks, iTunes would make this file when you added the EPUB to your book library in iTunes what is interesting is that in this bright new shiny iBooks-on-the-Mac era, iTunes still does this job! However, for EPUBs that come from other sources, there is no such file. When you buy an EPUB from the iTunes Store, the ist is already inside the EPUB. ![]() One of those entries, named “genre”, is the one that iBooks uses to assign an EPUB to a category.īut, you may be thinking, where does that ist come from? Good question. The ist contains a bunch of metadata entries about the EPUB. Instead, it uses a special file designed by Apple for use in iBooks (and, as you might guess from its name, in iTunes). opf file for assigning the EPUB to a category. IBooks, however, doesn’t use the raw metadata in the. Ideally, when the EPUB ends up in iBooks, it will be For example, a statement like Fiction says that the EPUB is Fiction. One of these (or maybe more than one, but only the first one is recognized by iBooks) describes the EPUB’s subject. opf file contains a bunch of metadata statements - that is, specific bits of code that describe the EPUB. One of the two files that I talked about can be found inside every EPUB: the. zip archive that contains a bunch of other files. In it, I described two files that, between them, control how iBooks lists a book.Īn EPUB is actually a specially constructed. (Things are going to get geeky here, so if that frightens you, skip down to the end of the article where I explain how to work around this bug.)ĮPUBs and Metadata - Some months back I wrote a piece about managing book metadata in iTunes, “ Managing Books in iTunes: This Novel Has a Nice Beat,” 14 January 2013. It all has to do with metadata (embedded information about your ebook), and how iBooks handles that metadata for EPUBs that originate from outside the iBooks Store. What gives? Why is it Uncategorized on your Mac and Fiction on your iPad? This astonishes you because the same EPUB, when you synced it from your Mac to your iPad through iTunes, shows up categorized as Fiction. Then, one day, you look at the Categories view in iBooks and you notice that the EPUB is part of an ever-growing category known as Uncategorized. You drop that EPUB file on the iBooks icon, the book opens, and you read it with pleasure. You’ve downloaded a shiny new EPUB from somewhere that isn’t Apple’s rechristened iBooks Store, and it’s on your Desktop in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. 1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura. ![]()
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