History of downloaded iBookstore samples?

Question

For some reason—presumably a sync by my iPhone that overwrote my iPad’s more recently downloaded library—the majority of my iBooks were deleted.

The books I purchased can easily be restored, but I had downloaded a bunch of samples to, well, sample, before I bought the books.

Shy of using the restore feature, which will probably wreak its own havoc the way my iPhone did, when I synchronized iCloud through it, is there any log or history of the samples I have downloaded? I am sure this will happen again, and I don’t think restoring your iPad is the intended user experience by Apple.

Answer 1

I'm afraid no such log or history exist.

Apparently either restoring a device, as iTunes does not make a backUp of your sample books, or upgrading to the lastest version of iBooks, will make your samples to dissappear.

Answer 2

I was able to recover the list of all books in iBooks, including sample chapters, with the following steps:

• Select a tool to parse iPhone/iPad backups on your hard drive. Google for "iphone backup extractor", there are various.

• Select a recent iPhone/iPad backup from the list presented by your extractor software.

• Select iBooks as the app you wish to extract.

• Search for a file called iBooks_v10252011_2152.sqlite, or something like that.

• Use a SQLite viewer (such as Base on the Mac) to view the ZBKBOOKINFO table.

• Look for the ZBOOKTITLE field - this should contain a list of all your books, including sample chapters, from the time of the backup!

• If you want to get fancy, try sorting on the ZSAMPLECONTENT field.