Ultimate Guide: Tweaking ePub Metadata in iBooks on Mac OS X Mavericks

How to Edit iBooks Meta Data under Mac OS X Mavericks

Posted by Jonny Greenwood on 11/26/2018 2:42:13 PM.

Dated back to the WWDC 2013, when Apple announced iBooks would be an independent application in the OS X 10.9 Mavericks, all the iBooks lovers are exciting about the coming iBooks for Mac app. Finally the day came, but I heard much noise among the cheers. A lot of people think the iBooks for Mac sucks, because it doesn’t allow people to edit the metadata.

People can’t edit eBooks metadata in iBooks for Mac

Some people may even don’t know what is metadata, to put it simply, metadata is the ID card for an eBook, like the cover, title, author name, publisher name, etc.

For those people who purchase eBooks from iBooks Store only, they might feel there is no need to edit the metadata. But a hard-core eBook fan won’t think so, many downloaded eBooks don’t have a complete meta information, like lack of cover or improper title spelling.

When the iBooks was only a child-column in iTunes, we can right click on an item then click “Get Info” to edit a book’s metadata just like modifying a song’s ID3 tag information.

But with iBooks for Mac in Mavericks, you only get this when right clicking on a book.

Sad story, feels like we are using a lite edition of iBooks, isn’t it?

The reason that iBooks enables people to edit the meta date is pretty obvious– they don’t want people to use iBooks to read downloaded books, but only the books purchased from iBooks Store.

Edit metadata with Calibre for Mac

Although editing metadata with iBooks is impossible, it doesn’t mean this is the end of the story. With another software, Calibre for Mac, we can edit book’s metadata then load the book into iBooks for Mac app.

First we import the book into Calibre.

From the image above we can see that the cover of the book A DANCE WITH DRAGONS is missing, which is a pretty typical case where we need to edit the metadata to add cover.

Right click on the book title, choose “Edit metadata”, then “Edit metadata individually”.

In this window we can customize almost all the important metadata. In this case I need to add a cover to the book, so I click “Browse” in “Change cover” area. If you want to make it simple, just directly click “Download cover”, and Calibre will search the cover from internet and add it for you.

After finding the cover image, click “OK” to confirm. Then you can see the cover in Calibre now.

But job has not been finished yet, in fact the cover is only added in Calibre’s library. To display the book’s cover in iBooks for Mac, we need to add the cover image into the book file.

No matter that we are adding cover or modifying the names, converting the book to EPUB again is necessary. Only in this way, we can completely edit the metadata inside the book, not only in Calibre library.

So the last step is to convert the book to EPUB, even this file is already an EPUB file.

Load the modified book into iBooks for Mac

Find the converted file in Calibre’s library and drag it into iBooks for Mac. Now we can see the book displayed in iBooks for Mac with the gorgeous cover.

Using the same method we can also add or modify other metadata like title, author & publisher, genre, etc. On Mac OS X Mavericks even the iBooks for Mac enable us to do so.

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Ultimate Guide: Tweaking ePub Metadata in iBooks on Mac OS X Mavericks