Warning, there is an issue with Books on the MacBook 16" M2 - check before you buy!

[jjhoekstra]

Hi all,

I recently bought a MacBook M2 pro (16GB, 2 TB) specifically for the use with Books. I have a library of about 5500 books, magazines and scientific articles with a total size of about 175 GB, which I use for research.

The problem is that opening Books results in a "out of system-memory" error meaasge after about a minute. I have contacted Apple-support and they have been very helpfull and were very interested int the problem, and I used their specially provided software to create a diagnostic file and a video-capture which were send to the USA. But unfortunately Apple for now has no solution. My old MacBook has no problems with the library, but ran out of space.

Thus my warning: If you buy a M2 MacBook and you have a larger Books-library, test before you buy. Or test after you buy so that you can return the MacBook. In my country, the 2 TB model cannot be returned, so that for now I am stuck with a fast MacBook for e-mails and my previous 6 year old MacBook for research work in my library. Fortunately I kept it!

And my question: does anybody had the same problem? And did you find a solution?

kind regards,

Jeroen

 

[Mr. Dee]

Can you maybe network the old and new MacBook Pro, use the M2 as a file server and backup/save any changes from the old to the new?

 

[jjhoekstra]

Well, I can network them, but I have a bit of a problem seeing what the advantage would be? I did not buy a new MacBook to be a file-server... For now I use my old MacBook for Books and media and syncing with my iPad/iPhone, and my new one for system development (ARM-assembly programming).

 

[xraydoc]

Hi all,

I recently bought a MacBook M2 pro (16GB, 2 TB) specifically for the use with Books. I have a library of about 5500 books, magazines and scientific articles with a total size of about 175 GB, which I use for research.

The problem is that opening Books results in a "out of system-memory" error meaasge after about a minute. I have contacted Apple-support and they have been very helpfull and were very interested int the problem, and I used their specially provided software to create a diagnostic file and a video-capture which were send to the USA. But unfortunately Apple for now has no solution. My old MacBook has no problems with the library, but ran out of space.

Thus my warning: If you buy a M2 MacBook and you have a larger Books-library, test before you buy. Or test after you buy so that you can return the MacBook. In my country, the 2 TB model cannot be returned, so that for now I am stuck with a fast MacBook for e-mails and my previous 6 year old MacBook for research work in my library. Fortunately I kept it!

And my question: does anybody had the same problem? And did you find a solution?

kind regards,

Jeroen

Seems like an odd error. No issue with the Books.app on my 14" MBP when loading a textbook with tons of images. And since your whole library isn't loaded at once, I'm not sure what's causing the error you're getting. But doesn't seem to be universal.

 

[HDFan]

the problem is that opening Books results in a "out of system-memory" error meaasge after about a minute.

I assume with Apple support you monitored books memory usage with activity monitor when you opened books?

 

[jjhoekstra]

I ended up talking to the European support centre with a senior technician for about two hours, where we did a lot of diagnostics while he was logged in in my computer. For instance he asked me to make a new user (where Books also generated the out-of-memeory message), looked at the activity-monitor, logged in with 'secure-boot (?), etc. He mailed me a Apple program which does detailed tracking. The resulting data was send to the states. They answered after a week that the problem is known, but the cause not yet.

To answer your question: in activity monitor, the first 15 second or so Books memory usage is around 200 MB or so, and the CPU usage is around ~70%. Than CPU usage goes up to 140% and system memory used starts going in steps of a few GB. The run-away process is the QuickLookSatellite which goes to 770% CPU use. I have attached two screen-captures of the activity-monitor to make my rambling a bit more clear!

 

[HDFan]

To answer your question:

Thanks. Guess you found a bug. Now the question is (1) can they reproduce it in-house and (2) if so where is it put on their bug queue.

 

[960design]

Wow! I immediately checked my books.app because I assumed I had a large number of books, audio books and PDFs as well. Sadly I only have a few hundred and cannot compare, so far the book app works perfectly.

PS. It looks like most of my books are still in the cloud and have not downloaded to the MBP16M2.

 

[ignatius345]

I have a library of about 5500 books, magazines and scientific articles with a total size of about 175 GB

It certainly seems like maybe Apple didn't account for libraries this large. Hope they work it out for you soon because it sounds like you made a pretty substantial hardware investment for this specific purpose.

Are there alternate applications you could use to access this content you've accumulated?

 

[jjhoekstra]

It certainly seems like maybe Apple didn't account for libraries this large. Hope they work it out for you soon because it sounds like you made a pretty substantial hardware investment for this specific purpose.

Are there alternate applications you could use to access this content you've accumulated?

If you know of an alternative application which also syncs with a iPad, I would very much like to hear about it!

I am presently trying the following:
1. make a fresh backup of my old MacBook
2. on the old MacBook delete all epubs/pdfs from Books.
3. delete all files from Books on iCloud
4. make again a fresh backup of the old MacBook.
5. Use this second backup to install my new MacBook.
6. Import as seperate files all epubs on the new MacBook. See what happens.
7. If all is OK, import the PDFs into Books on the new Macbook.
8. And than pray...
9. if it works, start sorting the books again into the appropriate collections.

This is bit of a dog of a process, and I bought 2 extra 2TB SSDs for it, but this is worth it if it works

 

[jjhoekstra]

Thanks. Guess you found a bug. Now the question is (1) can they reproduce it in-house and (2) if so where is it put on their bug queue.

Apparently they know the bug, and are working on it. I hope that, becaue it is in one of the essential (non-deletable) MacOs apps, the priority is a bit higher... One of the reasons why it is so annoying is that due to the dumbing down MacOs, there are almost no management tools for the user anymore. For instance the Books app use to have a 'rest library' option. But that is gone!!

 

[ddhhddhh2]

That Book app memory usage is insane! Seems like the app loads all the content as soon as you open it. Lazy loading could be a better concept, but hey, at least you "seem" to have found the issue. Maybe most people don' t have to load that many books, so the problem went unnoticed. Anyway, in my eyes, it's a software problem. We all know that software engineering and QA have been having issues in recent years, sometimes we even have to play the guinea pig .

 

[jjhoekstra]

Update on my attempts at solving my Books problem. In short: my prayers didn't help!!!!

So I did all the steps as I decibed last Friday. That was interesting...

I emptied BOOKS on the old macbook, by selecting all and deleting, and after a minute or so all the books where gone. All Books was empty and Collections where empty. However: in Authors 4 books where shown! These did not show up in any other selection or sorting criteria. So I checked com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books and there they were: 4 ePubs. I was happy as a pig in the mud as I hoped to have found the source of problems! Probably the .plist files for these 4 books got messed up somehow over the last years. (I copied these 4 files and checked them, but they themselves where normal ePubs.)

Next step: I made a backup of my old MacBook with the cleaned empty BOOKs-app and installed this backup on my new MacBook. The BOOKS app on the new MacBook filled itself with a few audio-books and books from the store and everything ran fine.

In parallel I went thru all the PDFs and ePubs I had (5500 files). I checked them all and I found 6 files which did not open. I deleted these. I also made sure that all file-names where correct and did not contain any strange character.

I than first imported the ePubfiles into BOOKS on my new macBook, about 770 files. This went fine and everything functioned. Great!

But unfortunately that is where my luck stopped.

As a next step I imported part of my PDFs, with the corrected file-names. And BOOKS changed all the file-names BACK to the way the were on my old MacBook!!! BOOKS almost acts like a computer virus!! Once it has seen a book, if you remove that books from BOOKS and import it later with a different file-name, it will change the file-name back to the old filename (in com.apple.BKAgentService/Data/Documents/iBooks/Books). And while doing this strange thing, it messed up some of the access-rights as well. At least 1 book had the access-rights set to no-access for anyone!

Apparently BOOKS has a hidden cache somewhere with data on all books ever imported into BOOKS, which overrides anything the user later tries to do.

So 4 days of copying, checking, making backup etc., for nothing.



So: has anybody any ideas?? Is there a way of deleting or resetting this hidden cache? Please!!!


A defeated and tired BOOKS user...

 

[960design]

I feel your frustration and can only offer that I am watching this thread with great interest, but no answers.

 

[GLTirebiter]

Yes, this is happening to me as well…watching, and thanks to the OP for opening the thread.

 

[NT1440]

Hi all,

I recently bought a MacBook M2 pro (16GB, 2 TB) specifically for the use with Books. I have a library of about 5500 books, magazines and scientific articles with a total size of about 175 GB, which I use for research.

The problem is that opening Books results in a "out of system-memory" error meaasge after about a minute. I have contacted Apple-support and they have been very helpfull and were very interested int the problem, and I used their specially provided software to create a diagnostic file and a video-capture which were send to the USA. But unfortunately Apple for now has no solution. My old MacBook has no problems with the library, but ran out of space.

Thus my warning: If you buy a M2 MacBook and you have a larger Books-library, test before you buy. Or test after you buy so that you can return the MacBook. In my country, the 2 TB model cannot be returned, so that for now I am stuck with a fast MacBook for e-mails and my previous 6 year old MacBook for research work in my library. Fortunately I kept it!

And my question: does anybody had the same problem? And did you find a solution?

kind regards,

Jeroen

A memory leak in the Books app is not a hardware fault 🙄

 

[ILoveCalvinCool]

If there's a CPU problem, try installing App Tamer:

App Tamer

 

[GLTirebiter]

Upgrading to Ventura 13.3.1 seems to have fixed this for me, but time will tell. Was getting out of memory either on startup or randomly after startup.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I have 424 books (but mostly historical books - a few certification books that are 600+ pages long but for the most part small <300 page books). I've only got a handful of PDFs.

I've never had a problem with books but I haven't really tried to do much outside of dropping books into the app or buying them in the app.

Watching this thread with interest.

If I was you, I might just try to use Calibre? https://calibre-ebook.com/ This is how I got my Kindle library (200+ books at the time) into my Apple Books library years ago.

 

[GLTirebiter]

Spoke too soon...the issue is still here in 13.3.1.

 

[GLTirebiter]

So i got out of memory a couple of times after upgrading to 13.3.1, and for a few days now it hasn’t happened. Fingers crossed, it worked itself out. How’s it going for others?
I called Apple Support and they denied it was a known issue.