Collections in Books app (on Mac) do not stay in alphabetical order

[James Steele]

Maybe it's me, but I'm using the Books app to collect various plugin and software PDF manuals. I'm creating a category for each developer/manufacturer and I manually sort them alphabetically but the refuse to stay alphabetized. Some stay in place for a while... others randomly relocate themselves.

I updated the subject line. This happens only when using my Mac Studio on 13.4 Ventura. No problem on iPad or iPhone.

[James Steele]

Well it looks like I'm going to have to try and find a third party app to create my PDF manual library. Books is totally FUBAR. Apparently when I launched Books on my Mac Studio, the screwed up order of collections then sync'd to my iPad, jacking those all up again. Plus, I created a collection on my Mac and moved a new PDF into it. The PDF did appear in Books on my iPad, but the collection was not created.

Seems like a bug I guess, but I'm going to be on the hunt for a more robust solution. It's fine, too, if it's more simple as I don't need to be confronted with all the paid books, and bookstore when I use the app. I just wanted to be able to store and organize/read PDF manuals on my iPad when I want. Syncing is important though, as I can much more easily download a PDF on my Mac and then place into the collection.

Alas... if only Books wasn't a buggy mess!

[bayswater]

I tried setting up manuals in Books some time ago but gave up. Stuff was never where I looked for it. Now I just put the manuals wherever the installer puts them on the Mac, or just in the Documents Folder if they’re directly downloaded. Then I put one of the colour labels on them to identify how they should be organized and use the labels to create smart folders that appear in the list on the left side of the Finder. I haven’t tried porting the organization to the iPad yet but I suspect if could be done.

[James Steele]

I tried setting up manuals in Books some time ago but gave up. Stuff was never where I looked for it. Now I just put the manuals wherever the installer puts them on the Mac, or just in the Documents Folder if they’re directly downloaded. Then I put one of the colour labels on them to identify how they should be organized and use the labels to create smart folders that appear in the list on the left side of the Finder. I haven’t tried porting the organization to the iPad yet but I suspect if could be done.

Yeah... some of the collections are syncing, albeit late and without any rhyme or reason. I just bought a Gen 9 iPad the other day, because the whole concept was to have the iPad sitting by my studio desk and primarily functioning as a "master manual." The repository of ALL information when I need to know something about any piece of hardware or software that I own. Great concept, but the syncing on Books is all messed up. If simply stopped my Mac Studio for syncing Books to iCoud, I'd probably be okay. It seemed to be okay with just the iPad. But having to add new PDFs only using the iPad would be cumbersome.

I'm on the hunt, as I said, soon for some third party app that can handle this better than Apple. You'd think with the gobs of money they are raking in over in Cupertino they could afford to put some programmers on this kind of thing?

[mikehalloran]

Books is totally FUBAR.
…
Alas... if only Books wasn't a buggy mess!

Oh yes. For me, Books is even worse on my iPad and iPhone. It broke big time in Big Sur and regained some functionality in Monterey.

I can sort in the Kindle Reader. The uploading apps are useless but Amazon's web upload tool is good. I was on a long merry-go-round ride with Support where they kept telling me that none of the problems I'd found existed. A week later, Kindle had a series of updates and all of my issues were fixed. A miracle!

[James Steele]

Just to quickly revisit this topic... I discovered that essentially collections apparently stay in the order in which they were created/added!

What I've done with my PDF hardware/software manuals is delete all the collections (retaining of course the PDFs themselves) then making sure the "Author" is updated to the name of the developer/manufacturer. The choose the broad "PDF" category and sort by Author. Then work my way down the list and create collections for each Author name (in this case developer/manufacturer) and then add the corresponding PDFs to that collection.

This way they stay in alphabetical order across all my devices.

Granted, at some point I will get a new plugin for which I do not yet have a category set up for that developer/manufacturer and it will appear at the bottom of the collections but that's not too bad. If I get enough of those, I can delete categories up to the point of the of the first new category and repeat the process.