Books on Monterey - A Followup

In a previous post, I discussed what was wrong with Books for Monterey.  I've been trying to use it since then and, as of today, have given up on the Mac version.  Why?

1. I lost all of my books on the iCloud.  Every one.  iCloud backup was of no use, and I opened a call to apple about this.  After 2 months they still haven't been able to recover them - see below.
2. If you reach for a book and want information on it, and select the 3 dots on the right to look at the "info" to it,  It supplies the cover, title and author.  No collection, date, publisher etc., or any other information.
3. You can't find which collections a book is contained in without going to each collection and looking for it.
4. Collections don' t show the numbers of items in them (as on the iPad version)

I do still use Books, but only on the iPad, but I organise them differently now.

I use Calibre to organise the books I want, tag them etc and then add them to Books when I'm completed.  I use the calibre library and a couple of perl scripts to make sure everything is consistent between calibre and Books.  I would like to be able to create collections via the tags in calibre, but that's for another day.

Audiobooks are still really broken, and I still use Plex and Prologue to listen to them.

Lost iCloud Books

After I installed a new Mac mini, all of my books (over 1500) on iCloud vanished.  On all my devices, totally.

I opened up a call to Apple about this and, as of 2 months, they have not been able to recover them.  The iCloud Drive does *not* save your books.  They're in some strange place.

The local copies of all books are stored in 

<Home directory>/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~com~apple~iBooks/Documents/

However, they are not all there.  If the file starts "period"-name.icloud it's just a reference to the file on iCloud and it needs to be downloaded before you can read it.

e.g:.

Backblaze jimmy$ ls -l .1Password\ for\ iOS.epub.icloud 

-rw-r--r--  1 jimmy  staff  173 16 Jan  2016 .1Password for iOS.epub.icloud

Jimmys-Mac:Backblaze jimmy$ hexdump -C .1Password\ for\ iOS.epub.icloud

00000000  62 70 6c 69 73 74 30 30  d3 01 02 03 04 05 06 5c  |bplist00?......\|

00000010  4e 53 55 52 4c 4e 61 6d  65 4b 65 79 5f 10 10 4e  |NSURLNameKey_..N|

00000020  53 55 52 4c 46 69 6c 65  53 69 7a 65 4b 65 79 5f  |SURLFileSizeKey_|

00000030  10 18 4e 53 55 52 4c 46  69 6c 65 52 65 73 6f 75  |..NSURLFileResou|

00000040  72 63 65 54 79 70 65 4b  65 79 5f 10 16 31 50 61  |rceTypeKey_..1Pa|

00000050  73 73 77 6f 72 64 20 66  6f 72 20 69 4f 53 2e 65  |ssword for iOS.e|

00000060  70 75 62 10 00 5f 10 1e  4e 53 55 52 4c 46 69 6c  |pub.._..NSURLFil|

00000070  65 52 65 73 6f 75 72 63  65 54 79 70 65 44 69 72  |eResourceTypeDir|

00000080  65 63 74 6f 72 79 08 0f  1c 2f 4a 63 65 00 00 00  |ectory.../Jce...|

00000090  00 00 00 01 01 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 07 00 00 00  |................|

000000a0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 86           |.............|

000000ad

Backblaze jimmy$ plutil -p - < .1Password\ for\ iOS.epub.icloud

{

  "NSURLFileResourceTypeKey" => "NSURLFileResourceTypeDirectory"

  "NSURLFileSizeKey" => 0

  "NSURLNameKey" => "1Password for iOS.epub"

}

If you open up the enclosing file in finder, it lies to you about the files and says it really exists.  Don't believe it.  Finder is lying.

I managed to recover about 1000 from my Backblaze backup, and old disk, a Mac that I hadn't turned on since the files were lost and another Carbon Copy Cloner backup..  The rest I've having to look for slowly on old disks, email, purchases etc.