In iBooks on 10.10, books can have series metadata as shown in the image.
What metadata do I need to add to an external epub (i.e. not from ibook store) so that it can be displayed as a series?

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I made it, but it's quite a bit tricky. Summary: You have to change the Books.plist file in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books for the books you want to have in a series, and also you have to add rows in the BKSeries-*.sqlite database on ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iBooksX/Data/Documents/BKSeriesDatabase for them and the series. Here's how I did it: The database has 4 tables: ZBKSERIESCHECK, ZBKSERIESITEM, Z_PRIMARYKEY and Z_METADATA. I only changed the first three tables. The "series" is treated just like a book in these tables.
Notes Those columns I didn't name, I just left them empty and it didn't affect the end result. I think it's waaay to difficult to put all your books and series properly when you have a lot of them. Hope to see someday something that do all this auto-magically. This is my first post. I hope everybody finds it useful. |
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I noticed that, in iBooks, I have a book (Inheritance) which iBooks highlights as a member of a series (in my case called 'Eragon' instead of 'The Farseer Trilogy'). In order to investigate this, I downloaded Inheritance and stripped the DRM using Requiem (on an old virtual machine) so I could poke about in the source code of the book. Unfortunately, I have bad news. I used Sigil to search for the word 'Eragon'. The word 'Eragon' appears nowhere in the metadata within the epub, indicating that this is not possible; iBook evidently maintains series information separate to the actual epub files. |
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I have a solution:
Be carefull while going into the iBook store though, if you see the ebook you edited, it will have a button saying "update." DO NOT click update, or you will have to do it over again. A whole lot easier than having to edit sqlite, and it works on both Mac and Windows. |
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I tried it myself, and found out, that the playlist in same folder that stores the epubs has informations about the book series. There are the metadata seriesTitle and seriesSequenceNumber set. But unfortunately changing it there does´t make Ibooks to list books as series. Also setting Metadata in the e-book itself saying series Title and seriesSequenceNumber is not working. Then I found a folder in usr. Library containers com.apple.IBooksX Data Documents BKSeriesDatabase, but it contains a SQL Database. Maybe the information is stored there. |
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