Year: 2013

So, one of the things I rely on for teaching is iTunes. I have a HUGE library of audio, video, and PDFs. A have a couple hundred playlists that include PDFs of the books. For years, I’ve found this a fast, effective way to teach. Drill down to the playlist folder, say Jazz, then find whatever playalong I want to use, and there it is in a playlist. Then click on that playlist, boom, there are all the tracks, AND the PDF of the book. Double click the PDF, boom…it’s ready to be played.

Simple, easy……except that Apple for some reason decided that iBooks was going to take over ALL the PDF and ePub duties from iTunes. Ok, fine….except that it cleans out ALL the PDFs from your playlists, and then proceeds to move all the ePubs and PDFs into a folder on your hard drive buried under ~/Library.

Stupid.

So, I have been holding off upgrading my Studio Mac (well, Hackintosh) to 10.9 because I didn’t want to lose all my carefully organized lists and PDFs. Luckily I found a couple of Apple Support threads. It actually is simple really, thanks to Kevin Edgecomb.

Before you install 10.9, make sure you BACKUP your iTunes library files. The XML, the .itdb, and the iTunes Library files all in Music->iTunes.

Ok, so, install 10.9, then do this:

1. Kill the bookstoreagent service using the Activity Monitor.
2. Delete the file for that service: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CommerceKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/bookstoreagent
3. Use AppCleaner to get rid of iBooks.

And reboot (at least, that is what I had to do). Initially, the iTunes Library that was on the Mac had all the PDFs deleted even though I had not run iBooks. But moving a copy of the library files to replace the ones that got “touched” before I ran the above stuff…..works fine. All my PDFs are there. Playlists good. Everything great.

I have iBooks on my Mac at home, and it is nice, but I have NO IDEA why Apple decided to just move everything to a hidden folder in ~/Library. It would make much more sense to move the PDFs into a FOLDER in Music->iTunes something like, I dunno, “PDFs”? And then something like, lets see…..”ePubs”? Or just a generic “Books” folder? Or maybe even just move everything to a folder in your home directory called “Books”. Lots of ways to do it RATHER than where iBooks wants to put stuff, i.e. “~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks”

Lame!!!!