ibooks ver1.5 pdf file name changed

Seriously though... we shouldn't have to do this.

First of all, i think you meant "obliviously". But more importantly, you are wrong. For Apple to blithely decide to change the way iBooks organizes our pdfs, when many of us have already invested a lot of time playing by the old rules, just because somebody somewhere thinks like you do that we should not be using filenames is very "user-unfriendly", to put it mildly. Differeent people have different ways of working- making a change like this was truly a solution in search of a problem. Not leaving in an option to use file names is unforgivably stupid.

I am not about t reorganize my library to conform to an upgrade so I switched to Goodreader. If I was given to conspiracy theorizing, I'd say that apple has no reason to fix this bug in a free app, which is probably driving sales of a paid app sold at th e apple store. Hmmm......I wonder.......

No joke. It doesn't make sense on multiple levels, especially since most of us actually went into iTunes and named the files there so we could sort them more accurately (I use the name, artist, album and genre fields so I can sort them accordingly in iBooks).

So not only is the original name of the file there to work from, but then the imported PDF itself is categorized in iTunes under the exact name you want it to display as, but then you open it up and *poof* its back to the internal data name of the original PDF... yet the "artist name", "album", and "genre" are all still there unchanged. It makes no freaking sense.

I'm so with you. I've got arround 70 PDF documentations for my work on my Ipad. And they're sorted randomly. And if I set the categorie / artist / title in all these documents in my iTunes, I expect the right pendant on my Ipad.

So dear programmers, please fix this f*****g bug and keep it simple - that's you're USP

Only 70? Try over 1,000.... This has seriously hampered productivity and rendered itself useless. Just when I thought I had the upper hand in referencing documents quickly this had to happen.

I'm not reuploading and creating various collections again, apple must fix ASAP. You could probably make apple liable for loss of efficiency and productivity and assign a $ value to it. Maybe that will shake their ifeathers.

I'm with you. I'm much closer to 1,000. I have a ton for work and a bunch of other books and chord charts. :grizzled:

Enough is enough. I called Apple Support. They refused to put me to Level 2 if I did not erase my iPhone and reinstall everything. So, I've emailed Tim Cook. If I learn anything about a fix, I will share with my Apple friends here.

"Dear Tim,

A law firm recently deployed 50 iPads. One of the primary purposes was to help lawyers lighten the loads of papers and pleadings that they must carry. iBooks was a brilliant solution to manage PDFs, and it worked very well until the last update.

After the last update, whenever a lawyer opens a pleading, the file name gets changed. When this PDF is closed, it becomes unrecognizable, with a name like "Untitled - 789".

This has really put an inconvenience on us and many others, as evidenced by the growing thread on Apple Discussions.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3556495?start=0&tstart=0

We have reached out to every imaginable source at Apple, to no avail. That is something that we have never experienced before.

As a last effort, we are asking for your help.

Could you please try to help, so that we can continue using and enjoying your products?

If this was not a bug, but a go forward strategy, can we please be given the opportunity to downgrade iBooks, so that we can have time to prepare our files for the upgrade?

A third party solution is not of interest. We like keeping all things Apple.

Thank you kindly.

Kieran"

Just discovered this issue and am as annoyed by it as everyone else. So Apple has changed the way iBooks reads book titles from using the filename to using the pdf metadata. This would not be so bad if pdf metadata were easy to edit, but it's not. Yes, you can do it file-by-file in Acrobat Pro and other similar apps but this is hardly a solution. The real problem has been that Apple has not yet taken books that seriously. You only have to look at the way they're managed in iTunes - yes they refer to 'author' rather than 'artist' in the list views, but all that changes as soon as you open the main Information window for a file. But the main problem is that the tag-editing facility in iTunes does not use the pdf metadata. In fact there is no way to edit the pdf metadata in iTunes, or for that matter in any other Apple software (I should be pleased if someone can tell me I'm wrong here). So they now base the operation of iBooks on pdf metadata which are essentially not alterable. Why don't they at least base iBooks on the tags that are editable in iTunes? Crazy - and extremely annoying.

I didn't even think about the fact that I have the full version of Adobe. For those who don't, they may be stuck with the metadata info and be REALLY screwed.

I have just found a workaround for this that may help some people. Let’s set out what the problem is first. The updated iBooks is changing the titles of some files when they’re opened. It does this when there is a conflict between the filename and the pdf metadata field ‘Title’. (The easy way to inspect the pdf metadata is to open the pdf in Preview and then use the Inspector window. If there is a field there called ‘Title’ that is populated, then this is what iBooks will change the name to when it opens the file.)

If there is nothing in the pdf metadata title field then iBooks will continue to use the filename. Ideally the solution would be to set the metadata title field to the title of the file. This can be done file-by-file (see below) but it’s laborious. The best solution would be a batch change on a folder of files that does it automatically. I don’t know of a way to do this (it can’t even be done in Automator because although you can set a metadata field, you can’t specify this action as a variable.)

So if it’s not immediately possible to set the metadata title field to match the filename, the next best thing is to eliminate the contents of the metadata title field. There is a nice and simple piece of free software that will do just this called PDFInfo (from Sybrex). What’s great about it is that you can batch process a folder full of pdfs as well as doing it a file at a time. If you make a folder of the pdfs you want to edit then drag it to the source window in PDFInfo all you then need to do is to tick the ‘Change Title’ item but leave the ‘New Title information’ field blank. This will clear out all the pdf metadata title fields.

Then trash the old pdfs in iTunes, replace them with the newbatch and sync to your iPad.

Warning: you should only do this on the files that are giving you problems. If you do it on files that you’re happy with in the updated iBooks then you may lose metadata that you might need if you don’t want iBooks to revert to the file title.

This does not, by the way, absolve Apple from the responsibility of sorting out the iBooks app(!)

All this for what? With respect, I gave the best solution in the last post in Page one of this thread. All in all, Goodreader is a much superior app.

I agree wholeheartedly- tried Goodreader and haven't looked back. It's a far superior app.

While I have switched to good reader and unreal book (which is far superior to good reader for my particular uses) I think what the issue comes down to is taking an app that worked perfectly fine for us, changing it to render it useless, and then being completely unresponsive to those who had their app destroyed. When you offer an app for free that does exactly what it needs, and then change it to make it useless, and the best solution is "go ahead and buy a different one...it's superior to ours and we will get a cut anyway" that to me is a bit arrogant.

It amazes me how many people fail to see that. Yes, good reader is a better app but was unnecessary until the poorly tested upgrade (at least for many of us).

So to voice concerns is warranted and is the only way to tell apple how we feel in hopes of better service in the future. I think that may be the "for what" u asked about. And Ty for your good reader suggestion. With respect, I can see that it is a better app but I'd rather have $5 in my pocket and the time I had to spend resetting all my files back. And with respect, "buy another app and reward us for messing up" is not a solution to the root of the problem...though it will solve the problem better than any of the time consuming work arounds in my opinion.

The concluding phrase in your last sentence underscores the point I make in context.

I have no experience of Unreal Book, but Goodreader has a much superior file management system to iBooks, never mind it's current file name-changing problem.

Goodreader is a great app!

BUT

Just try dragging over 500 or 1,000 PDFs over to see how fast it crashes.

If I could drag my iBook PDF library over to Goodreader, then I would have. However, the only way to move such a vast library is to do it in groups of 20, which is a non-starter for me.

My latest calls to Apple reveal that they "have received many calls on the issue".

Fingers crossed!