8.4 iBooks update is terrible.

We are fellow users here on these forums, if you want to leave feedback for Apple : http://www.apple.com/feedback/ibooks_ios.html

As far as I can see the PDF category is now a way of viewing all PDFs in one place, it doesn't contain a separate copy of them.

I do have PDFs, and the PDFs collection seems to be a way to view all of your PDFs in one view in the app, instead of having to go through each collection. Until if/when it changes you could create a new collection to put your unread PDFs in, you should be able to use the Edit button at the top of the collection list to move it (after tapping Edit your collections should get an icon to their right allowing you to drag them into a different order) so that it's the first collection after PDFs.

I use iBooks for almost 1000 PDFs. From tome to time 10 or 100 of them have to be replaced by updated ones. I learned that it was easier to delete all of them on my iPad and copy the whole and updated collection via iTunes again, so i don't have to delete up to 100 different PDFs seperately, either on iTunes or iOS, because only the new ones will appear in the PDFs-Section in iBooks.

Since iOS 8.4 all PDFs are in the PDFs-Section and I can impossibly find out, which ones are new and already in the correct collection, without going crazy or losing a lot of time.

What do you recommend?

I use a combination of GoodReader and SugarSync (presumably DropBox would also work) for PDFs that I need to do much with. It depends what you want to do, but back when I spent time figuring this out - around three years ago I guess - iBooks didn't work very well for high-powered PDF use.

Maybe Evernote would be worth looking at as well.

@wishesfordreams: I find this new behaviour very annoying, too. Ich read hundreds of PDFs with iBooks, and i can't distinguish the new ones from the ones already read and moved to a folder anymore. It is not even possible to sort the PDF-Folder by date to filter the PDFs that were last added. iBooks is nearly useless for me since iOS 8.4.

The last sentence is exactly what I´m thinking.

Same problem with the new "feature" here ..... if I wanted to get a full listing I'd have gone into "All"..

If it's going to stay like this , a work around would be a toggle that checks if the PDF is in an existing collection and displays it, or not as the case may be - otherwise as someone mentioned higher up, iBooks has unfortunately become pretty much useless for management of PDF documents / adding new PDFs and quickly categorising them into a collection

I have over 38 collections which contain a mixture of epub and PDFs, so my books are arranged by subject or fiction genre regardless of the format the book is in. I could live with the system PDF collection that contains all the PDFs, especially if, like Books in iCloud the option is there to actually hide that folder. (I have sent in a feature request for that workaround via the feedback form).

But what makes iBooks on iPad a mess since the recent upgrade, is that I have spent time today reorganising my bookshelves within each collection to how they were before the new version of iBooks - only to find that my manual order does not remain in place and the collections become a jumble of epub mixed with PDFs in no order that I've been able to determine. This makes it impossible to easily scan collections and find relevant books - even series of books are now broken up and interrupted by PDF files.

I have tried organising the main PDF folder to see if that can affect the order of the same file within a collection, but although the order is altered within the collection, again I cannot understand those changes. Having the collections in author or title order is not an option as many of my PDFs lack the metadata to be used. These system bookshelf arrangements lack the ability to keep an author's series together and sequential, and a multi-author series is just dispersed across a collection. Previously the manual bookshelf sort was one that proved to be the best and infinitely flexible so different collections could all be organised differently to suit my needs, but that has been broken by this recent update.

If anyone has found a method of being able to impose a manual order that, like in iBooks on the Mac, will stay in place, please let me know.

S

I too am very concerned with the unruly behavior of iBooks in iOS 8.4. I have a 128 GB iPad, and have hundreds of PDF files from Scribd and issuu and other services, and I generally organize them into their own folders, by title, author, or subjects. Up until now, moving a file meant "moving" - it would not show up in the PDF folder. Now, everything I move stays in the new folder AND the PDF folder, making it difficult to figure out what has and hasn't been filed away. PLEASE FIX THIS!!!!

These are user-to-user forums, if you think that something needs fixing then use the feedback link provided above

When I first upgraded to the new version I saw that all my PDFs had to resync to my iPad (which had to be done in several goes, as they did not all copy over in one session). This was despite the fact that everything in iBooks had already been copied over to my iPad via iTunes, as I have too many books/PDFs to be selective.

What I have found is that despite those PDFs already being in Collections from the previous version of iBooks, if I - on the iPad - move them from the PDF folder to the right collection, then when I organise my bookshelf in that collection the shelf order appears to stay as I've sorted it. Obviously I have to monitor this for a while longer to see if my observation remains true, but if so, then this does solve part of the problem that I raised in my previous post.

The downside is that it is a long, tedious task to identify which PDFs in the PDF folder need to be moved where, especially as those newly moved PDFs still stay visible in the PDF folder and the collection already had those documents included from the last iBooks version. I am therefore systematically paging through all my iBook collections on my MBP, identifying which are PDFs, location them in the PDF folder on iPad and then moving them to the correct folder. My experience so far is when I arrange this newly gathered collection, then that bookshelf order has remained intact.

It is a long winded work around to solve this problem, but if it works then I will soon be able to ignore the PDF folder as before and just concentrate on my own collections. Any new PDFs added directly to iBooks on iPad will appear at the top of the screen and I can easily move them into folders. But I wish I hadn't got to go through this exercise.

I have also found this with the 8.4 update. I have hundreds of PDFs organised into custom categories, and now find they are duplicated under the generic PDF category. Is this a real duplication or a mirror of the PDF???

Peter

Hey Bookgirl13, you may find down the track when you go to synch new additions via iTunes, that iTunes tends to deselect 'all books' and starts syncing with 'selected books'...this may well remove the books that you have carefully reorganised in iBooks.