I wished to add an author’s name to a pdf I had uploaded; was unable to obtain any change to Books app permissions. Prior experience was that the Books table was editable. Now no authority whatsoever.
Re App launch/relaunch: Yes, ran Disk Utility a couple of times (an hour per First Aid run!), twice from Recovery, twice from normal Big Sur M1. I tried using Cocktail and CleanMyMac X to no avail. Running a Mac Mini M1. Hm… M1 & 11.2.3’s Disk Utility could be the problem.
Thanks, Bill
Yea, editing book metadata seems to not be available in the Books app.
On my old computer running Sierra, I could edit this in iTunes. I could select a book, type CMD-I to open it’s info dialog and change the metadata. But using Books on Catalina, there doesn’t seem to be a way to pull up the metadata window - the only property the app will let me change is the title.
Well on Big Sur I can’t even change the title. 
The same no-edit problem happened in Catalina Books for some files. One work-around is to export the document (drag it from Books to the desktop), edit the title using Howard Oakley’s xattred from eclecticlight.co, and then re-add the document to Books.
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thanks, James, these look like very useful tools!
I think this is most likely a change in Books more than a problem with your Big Sur installation—Books has been fussy with metadata for some time.
If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro or another PDF editing app, you may be able to manipulate the PDF metadata to add the Author Name and then reimport the PDF.
One option that might be acceptable is:
- Open the PDF in Preview
- Select File → Print
- Select PDF → Save as PDF
- In the save-as dialog, there are fields where you can specify the title, author, subject and keywords
Of course, doing this doesn’t modify the document. It prints to a new document so you may lose things like the ability to edit form fields and possibly other document features.
Thanks. Other complaint: The notice “You do not have permission to open the application xxyyzz.” still shows up regularly, but the next time I try to launch the app, within a few seconds, the app launches as always. I live with it.
Bill
Thank you David, I may give it a try if I need to make changes.
Regards,
Bill
For giggles, try launching one of those apps, leave it running (there’s relatively little reason to quit apps these days if you have a decent amount of RAM) and then restart your Mac, with the checkbox to reopen windows selected. I’d be curious if you get the permissions error on restart.
Also, does this happen when you use a different user account? I presume your account is an admin account?
Adam,
PowerPoint took two tries to launch, Word, Excel and BusyCal now launch on first double click.
Leaving PowerPointt open, I restarted the Mini and PowerPoint was open when the Mini restatrted.
I closed PowerPoint and it opened on the first double-click as did all else.
With a different admin account, everything launched on first try.
Something was wrong with my Account. I’ll form a new one tomorrow.
Bill
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