Don't want iBooks to always paste the "Excerpt From" of what I have copied

Question

I read on iBooks, and some other resources and gather my notes in EverNote. When I copy a text from iBooks to keep it as a note in some other external application like EverNote, it keeps pasting the source info which is so annoying and I have to keep deleting them after every copy-paste. For example:

“To bind this class using Ninject, I specify the value of the constructor parameter using the WithConstructorArgument method in the AddBindings method, as shown in Listing 6-20.”

Excerpt From: Adam Freeman. “Pro ASP.NET MVC 5.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=4CB3769B56E7D2A905C0332D53D7E31D

Answer 1

Here is a solution that requires no third-party software and lets you keep using the standard ⌘C shortcut to copy text in Books.

1. Create a Quick Action “Copy without Citation in Books”

1. Open Automator and choose File > New (⌘N).

2. For the type of document, choose Quick Action. This will allow us to create a keyboard shortcut for it later.

   

3. Configure the workflow as follows:

   • Workflow settings

     • Workflow receives current [text] in [Books]
     • (Leave the other three settings at the default)

   • Add in the actions list:

     1. Copy to Clipboard

   

4. Use ⌘S to save the Quick Action. Name it “Copy without Citation in Books”.

The “workflow receives current text in Books” setting in the workflow bypasses the clipboard-modifying behavior of Books. Thus, the workflow needs no extra action to strip the text added by Books.

2. Give the Quick Action a keyboard shortcut of ⌘C in Books

1. Open System Preferences > Keyboard. View the Shortcuts tab and select App Shortcuts on the left.
2. Click the + button to add a new App Shortcut.

3. Fill in the sheet as follows:

   • Application: Books
   • Menu Title: Copy without Citation in Books
   • Keyboard Shortcut: ⌘C

   

4. Click Add. You will see the shortcut appear in the list:

   

And you’re done. From now on, when you want to copy your selected text in Books, just press ⌘C and the exact text will be copied.

Answer 2

This blog post gives an example of how to do it using an Automator script with a keyboard shortcut.

In Automator, create a new Quick Action that receives no input. Give it these three actions:

1. Get Contents of Clipboard
2. Run Shell Script
3. Copy to Clipboard

Put this in the Run Shell Script action:

# strip out iBooks citation
sed -E -e 's/^[ ]?[0-9]* //g' | sed -E -e 's/“[ ]?[0-9]?[ ]?//g' | sed -E -e 's/”$//g'  | sed -E -e 's/^(Excerpt From).*//g'

After saving the service, you can assign a shortcut to this action, such as ⌃⌥⌘I, in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services. Then you hit that shortcut before you paste if you want to get rid of the text that iBooks added.

Answer 3

UPDATE: This solution no longer works in the latest Books and macOS, seems like Books no longer does the quote thing but limits the maximum number of characters that can be copied.

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Starting from macOS Monterey, Apple made the Shortcuts app available on Mac, so if you don't want to fiddle with Automator, you can create a shortcut:

NOTE: It doesn't seem possible to trigger this shortcut with ⌘C (it doesn't override the built-in logic in Books) or to make it specific to Books.

NOTE 2: Whenever a shortcut is triggered, macOS shows an icon in the system menu bar (which stays visible for a few minutes). This is annoying, but not the end of the world.

The script for the Run Shell Script action:

sed -E -e '1h;2,$H;$!d;g' -e 's#^[^“]*“(.*)”[^”]*$#\1#g'

The first -e makes sure sed works with multiline input (huge thanks to the person who posted this answer).

Answer 4

One workaround is

• Right-click the text
• Click Translate Selection
• Choose output language as the same one you're reading
• Click Copy Translation

Answer 5

You could use Keyboard Maestro to trigger the following AppleScript:

set original_clipboard to the clipboard
set paragraph_count to count of paragraphs of original_clipboard
-- assuming the last two paragraphs are what you want to strip out--
-- that is, the blank line and the attribution
set new_clipboard to paragraphs 1 thru -2 of original_clipboard as string
set the clipboard to new_clipboard
-- now you can paste

With Keyboard Maestro you would make a new macro, triggered by some keystroke (maybe Command-Option-V), and the first step would be an "Execute an AppleScript" (in the Execute section) using the above script. The next step would be a "Paste" (in the Clipboard section). You would copy your text, then click where you want to paste it, then press Command-Option-V to have it pasted in without the last two paragraphs.

Other macro programs would work too as long as they know how to execute an AppleScript.

Answer 6

Here is how to set up a Keyboard Maestro macro to strip the extra text, including the quotation marks, the moment the text is copied from iBooks.

First, create a macro group called “iBooks-specific mapping” and add iBooks within “Available in these applications”. (In more recent macOS versions, the application will be named Books instead of iBooks.)

Then create a macro named “Copy Without Citation”. Assign it the hot key ⌘C. Give the macro the following actions:

1. Clipboard > Copy
2. Clipboard > Search and Replace
   • Search: System Clipboard
   • for: Regular Expression (case sensitive)
     • ^“
   • and replace with:
     • (leave empty)
3. Clipboard > Search and Replace
   • Search: System Clipboard
   • for: Regular Expression (case sensitive)
     • ”\s*Excerpt.*Books\.\s?$
   • and replace with:
     • (leave empty)

This is how it will look in Keyboard Maestro:

Now any text in iBooks copied using that keyboard shortcut will have the extra text stripped from both ends.

Answer 7

I have created a script for ClipMenu (macOS clipboard utility) to strip unwanted information:

return clipText.replace(/^“/, '').replace(/”\s*Excerpt.*iBooks\.\s?$/, '');

Save as /Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/ClipMenu/script/action/iBooks.js

Answer 8

Below are steps for copying text from iBooks:

1. Highlight the passages you wish to copy.
2. A popup will be opened automatically or you must open a popup using a right click on selected passages.
3. Select the 'Add Note' option from the popup.
4. The selected/highlighted text will be shown on the left pane.
5. Right click on the passages in the left panel and select the 'Copy' option.

I have created a video to show how it works: https://youtu.be/ZQLl_Gl9TMw

Happy coding!

Answer 9

from Amir Raminfar's answer. this is a way if you want copy directly without Command C to save content to clip board.

just change Workflow receives current to: "text" in "Books.app" and disable get contents of Clipboard.

Answer 10

An altogether different approach is to abandon iBooks (/Books) and use a different eReader. Having spent a long time failing to implement several of the above solutions, I think it is a valid alternate to choose an eReader that does not pollute the clipboard contents with the citation, curly quotes and invisible control characters. My suggestion to you is Calibre. Calibre's main purpose is to convert between book formats, but it has a competent viewer which has all the features you get on the Apple product, albeit not as beautifully presented.

https://www.calibre-ebook.com/

Answer 11

On my machine running Catalina, the solution in https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/382603/449477 worked beautifully. However, this was not the case when using the same solution on my other machine running Monterey.

I attempted to follow the solutions proposed above, but the biggest barrier was working with regular expressions passed to sed - I'm not great with regular expressions and ran out of patience. I figured I'd be a lot happier if I could get the clipboard contents (with the citation) into Python where I could then use some tools I'm a bit more comfortable with to strip the citation.

This involved creating a Shortcut as shown below:

This passes the clipboard contents to the script, which can easily read this input using sys.stdin.read() and then manipulate as needed. The particular implementation shown below to remove the citation is not very elegant, and may break depending what I try to copy out of Books, but it works for now. The important part is that should it ever break, I'm much more confident that I can quickly fix in Python rather than going back down the regex rabbit hole. The contents of copy-from-books-without-citation.py are below:

import sys
data = sys.stdin.read()
remove_citation = data.split('“',1)[1].rsplit('”',1)[0]
print(remove_citation)

Answer 12

The solutions with sed command seems to not work properly with Unicode content, so I decided to create my own solution in Python and a detailed guide.

The solution I made here is sure to work on macOS Monterey 12.6, released on Sep 12, 2022.

Goal

The goal is to create a keyboard shortcut (like ⇧⌘C) in Apple Books that copy texts without the annoying citation info.

Guide

Step 1. Download remove_citation.py from this repo.

Save it in an easy-to-access path like ~/scripts/remove_citation.py

Step 2. Make sure python3 is available.

A way to do this:

1. Install Homebrew.
2. Install Python3 and pip3: brew install python3
3. (not necessary) Install pyperclip: pip3 install pyperclip

There may have been python3 in your mac. Probably at /usr/bin/python3.

The python3 installed with Homebrew may not be the default python3 used in automator shell scripts.

Step 3. Create the Quick Action in Automator

Create a new Quick Action in Automator like this one:

1. Receive text in Books.app
2. Run shell scripts with command:

/opt/homebrew/bin/python3 <path_to_the_dir>/remove_citation.py

3. Copy to Clipboard
4. Save the workflow with a name like "Copy without Citation.workflow".

Remember to replace <path_to_the_dir> with your own path to the script.

Maybe replace the python3 path too with the result from which python3 or just python3.

Step 4. Create a Keyboard Shortcut

Go to: System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Services > Text > Copy without Citation

Assign a shortcut (like Cmd + Shift + C) to it.

(optional) Step 5. Allow Books.app to access the script

When using the quick action in Books.app, you may encounter an error saying "Operation not permitted".

The reason may be that Books.app is not authorized to access the python script.

To solve this, you may grant Books.app Full Disk Access.

Then the quick action should be functioning.

One More Thing to Keep in Mind

When you select texts in Apple Books, a small menu shows up.

The keyboard shortcut and quick action won't work when the menu is shown.

You need to click somewhere else to close the menu before using the keyboard shortcut.

My Repo

https://github.com/Roger-Wu/remove-apple-books-citation

Answer 13

After playing around with this for a while I found a fairly simple solution to this problem using Automator. It requires three separate keystrokes, however. First you have to copy the text in Books, using Command-C. Then create an Automator quick action that does the following three actions:

1. Get Contents of Clipboard
2. Filter Paragraphs to return paragraphs that begin with “
3. Copy to Clipboard

I assigned the keystroke Command-Shift-I to this quick action.

Once it's all set up, you can copy a piece of text in Books, then run the quick action, then paste it wherever you like.

You would think it would be easier to make the first step of the quick action be "Copy to Clipboard" and then you wouldn't have to begin with Command-C; unfortunately, copying inside of Books doesn't seem to function normally. I even tried adding Command-C via the "record keystroke" method and it still produces wonky results. So, after wasting several hours trying to build the copy selection step into the workflow I decided to just accept it as a three step process: copy selection, trigger quick action, paste revised selection.

What you can do to streamline a bit, if you have Alfred installed on your computer, is create an additional Alfred Workflow triggered by a hotkey that triggers, in sequence, the following "dispatch key combo" events: Command-C, and then Command-Shift-I (or whatever keystroke you assigned to your Automator quick action.

Answer 14

This Keyboard Maestro macro works on macOS Sonoma.

The shell script is:

pbpaste | perl -pe 's/^“//g' | perl -0pe 's/”\n\nExcerpt From.*//s'