[Luckynp]

I have been struggling with this for a couple of months now, and have finally made bookshelf view do what I want. This is to display my books in normal alphabetical order by author.

In normal use, iBooks adds newly uploaded books at the top of your bookshelf. It is then possible to drag them to whatever position you want.

HOWEVER, this order will be lost if any of the following 3 things happens:

1 You inadvertently untick your books in iTunes and do an automatic sync. This will wipe all your books. If you then resync them, Apple will do its own thing.

2 Apple update the iBooks application.

3 Apple update the iPad OS.

All these things have happened to me.

What then happens is that iBooks orders the books in the way it wants, which is in REVERSE ALPHABETICAL ORDER. If you have 1500 books( nearly all un DRM'ed) , as I have, this is incredibly annoying.

My Workaround

In order to sort books, iBooks uses the Author sort field in the book's metadata file.

You must make sure that the author's name is entered in this field, surname first (i.e. Tolstoi, Leo rather than Leo Tolstoi). You can use Calibre to do this.

You then reconvert the books, again using Calibre so that the new metadata is saved. Then untick your books and sync, to remove them from the iPad. Remove the old versions from iTunes and add the newly converted books back to itunes, make sure they are ticked and resync.

This will at least give you your books in consistent reverse alphabetical order.

To make the books display in normal alphabetical order, I have entered a 'reverse' alphabetical code before the author's name in the author sort field. e.g., glo Tolstoi, Leo. Therefore, when iBooks applies its reverse alpha sorting, it reverses the reverse order.

This may seem like a long way round, but it's better than spending two days manually sorting books only to have them scrambled again by Apple's next software update.