Allen J. Hall

A recent Stanza update for the iPod Touch and iPhone left me with a completely blank ebook library!  horror!! So, not being content with doing things the most straight forward way, and redownloading every book, I decided to see if you could get all your books back from Stanza somehow.  To learn how, join me after the jump…

First, a few caveats:

1. We’re going to resurrect the book files from your most recent iPod backup.  [You did have a most recent iPod backup, right?]
2. We’re going to lose all our info about bookmarks and books read etc. etc. with this approach.  Since we’re mostly concerned with the actual books, I’m not going to worry about this.  I just didn’t want to try to remember what I had downloaded, and for more obscure sources, some books may have needed to be reconverted etc.  [ugh]
3. We’re going to dabble in the command line (Terminal.app) – if that frightens you, I don’t know what to tell ya.  You’re probably better off redownloading everything inside Stanza itself.
4. I may miss quoting a few sources in this one, in an attempt to get the info out quickly, if you find I’ve used info you authored, please get in touch so I can properly give you credit.
5. I find the Mac (osX) to be the most versatile computer, and so this is only going to be focused on osX.  You may however find that portions of the following work for Windows and Linux (sorry those two are in the same sentence penguin guys- no slight meant).

Second- let’s get to it…

1. You need a program that can work on the iPod backup files (.mdbackup files usually located in your user/library/mobilesync/ folder).  For this, I used: MobileSync-Inspect (it works with 10.4.x and also other os’s).
2. To make it easy to peruse the files available inside the .mdbackup files, I ran a simple command to save the output of mobilesync-inspect to a single text file:

   ./mobilesync-inspect list >currentbackup.txt

3. Now, I found the files for the books located here: more currentbackup.txt |grep Documents/Library/
4. So, first step is simply snagging copies of the total contents of the library to a folder on the desktop. I first create a folder “StanzaLibraryResurrection” on the desktop…
5. Then, snag all the library into the folder: ./mobilesync-inspect backup Documents/Library/* ~/Desktop/StanzaLibraryResurrection/
6. Once that is complete (will take a while) you may want to backup the folder just to save some time in case you mess something up- label it red to avoid confusion and only copy out of it when needed.
7. Now, peruse the folders a bit.  You’ll see something like this:
   
8. Notice the folders with the syntax #.explode? Those are the book ePub files in unzipped format. I wish they were saved zipped, however, we can fix that. [Stanza likely unzips them to speed up library surfing.]
9. An ePub file is pretty much everything inside one of those numerical folders zipped up. You can have a look around and see the structure. Notice the content.xml files and the .opf and mimetype etc. These all have a purpose. For more info, you may find this page helpful (and it includes a sample.epub file): ePub Tutorial
10. Now, don’t just go zipping the folder up. I tried that for a few hours before coming across the important tidbit that the “mimetype” file must be uncompressed within the zip! Complex! Finally with some digging, I found that the following command will work for you if you open the terminal inside the folder of the ebook you want to convert (for instance …/Library/0/10/ ): zip -Xr9D 10.epub mimetype *
11. So, if you’ve accomplished that last one, you’ve successfully resurrected 1 book from your iPod backup that contained your Stanza library! The only thing left to do is to get it back into your iPod.
12. If you haven’t already been doing this, I’m glad you’re about to, because it’s quite a nice thing to be able to do… if you delved into this tutorial, you probably already are doing this, and so you can skip the rest of the steps- you already know what to do. Go grab Calibre!! Calibre is like an ebook iTunes… well, sort of. It’s not super graceful, but it does the job and does it well. It’s getting even better with each new release. And guess what- it’s FREE! [The all important price-point for a graduate student.]
13. Once you have Calibre installed, “Add” your newly created ePub ebook. It should autodetect all the metadata for you, and you should have a line in your library with all the book info! Nice.
14. Finally, to get it on your iPod/iPhone, go to Preferences in Calibre, and startup the content server. Then open Stanza, and use the URL listed in Calibre (with your computer’s ip address!) to surf to your shared library and download your ePub straight into Stanza on the iPhone. A more detailed discussion of how to do this and setup ISBN and cover image searching can be found here: 101:iPhone+Stanza+Calibre

In order to speed up the process, I may make a little applescript or shell script… but time is tight, so if you have questions, feel free to add them in the comments here. I’ll try to get to them when I have a free moment. Good luck!!