Can't edit Author in Books for macOS

Question

Can't edit Author in Books for macOS

I am completely unable to edit the Author and Category fields of some—but not all—PDFs in my Books library.

In some cases, I can click to highlight the Author, make a change, and the change is applied. Great.

Some other PDFs allow me to highlight the Author and type in new info, but when I click out of the field, the info reverts to whatever was there before I made the change.

And on some other PDFs, I am unable to even highlight the Author field. Clicking on it repeatedly does nothing.

Here's another peculiarity: Some of the "unknown author" entries do not fall into the correct order when I arrange the list by author. They should all be listed between "T" and "V", but they are not. They seem to be arranged randomly with some where they should be and others not where they should be.

Does anyone know how to fix this? I've not been able to find this issue discussed anywhere else.

This has been an issue since well before Catalina's release. I believe I have been unable to fix this since iBooks became Books for macOS. .

I'm using a 2017 iMac with Catalina and an iPhone 6s with iOS 13. (Obviously, I don't even have the option of editing this info on the phone, but if someone thinks I can fix this from the phone and have those changes propagate to the Mac, please chime in.)

iMac 27" 5K, macOS 10.15

Posted on Oct 24, 2019 7:02 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Phillip Breske Author

Level 1

115 points

Oct 24, 2019 8:05 PM in response to Phillip Breske

Some progress: I opened the Mac's System Preferences and Apple ID > iCloud Drive - Options and turned OFF Books in the list of apps that store documents and data in iCloud. That immediately removed almost all the PDFs from the Books app on my Mac (I don't know why they didn't all disappear, but that's what happened).

When I turned Books ON in iCloud Drive - Options, the PDFs eventually reappeared and I was then able to edit the Author names and Categories.

More good news: When I checked the list of PDFs in Books on my iPhone, most of the titles and authors had already updated there, but it took a trip to Settings > Apple ID > iCloud > Books OFF, then ON again. This forced the Books app to reload the list of PDFs and every one of them was fixed.

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Answer 2

Oct 24, 2019 7:10 PM in response to Phillip Breske

I should add that the author of the PDF in the screenshot above is "American Punch Company." That's what I have tried to enter several times in the past and it never accepted the change, but it is listed as though the author begins with the letters "Am." Somehow, it seems the app knows the name of the author, but is listing it as "unknown."

Maybe this info will help find a solution.

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Can't edit Author in Books for macOS

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