iBook opens on the last page no matter what I do

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i hear your pain and i can't take it anymore. follow these steps.

1. open your book in iba and make sure you see the page thumbnails on the left side of the window.

2. select the page you want your ibook to open to. make sure it is highlighted and appears in the main window. i don't think you can open to the cover page, so don't select that.

3. now, instead of exporting, do a preview to your mac. this will place the book into iTunes and by extension, be in ibooks.

4. open the ibooks app and see the cover of your book. select and open it.

5. it will open to whatever page you selected in step 2.

now i fully understand that you use export instead of preview. i do not. i kinda think that it should work the same if you follow the above steps, but from the sounds of it that might not be the case. i will try that later if you insist, but i have little use for the export function.

i hope your book is a great success, no matter what page it opens to.

soon after my last post to you, it occurred to me that if indeed this works as you say with export (and you were very thorough so i don't doubt it, but trust and verify seems to be the path i should follow), that perhaps i know why you are getting these results and how you can influence the outcome and have the exported book open where you want it. that said, my work flow is via preview (and not export), which i like better.

just a few weeks ago i was wondering why people use export and not preview when the target is ibooks. i came to the conclusion that preview created its copy into iTunes/ibook but export allowed you to place your actual ibook in ibook format anywhere you want. since preview to iPad stopped working for me and others (documented on this forum) under iOS 8.something, i gravitated to preview to mac, sync to iPad via iTunes, which i was clued into by the great tom g. whether this and any other error was fixed by iOS 9 i do not know as i am too busy at this point trying to finish my book. but soon.

i hate to speculate what might fix this, but right now i am pressed for time to finish my book, but i will because you might have the time to see if it works. it shouldn't take long for anyone to test, but i have to stay focused on my current project. it is easier for me to tell you and for you to test it out, especially if this is critical to you.

this is either (1) a bug in export which cannot be fixed or (2) requires what i am about to tell you or (3) someone else might know.

this is #2 above, which i would try after i verified your findings. open up your book in ib author. make a slight change to the page where you want the book to open up. easy to do on one of the special pages, like the copyright page, perhaps harder to do on the intro media. just delete a word or a letter and then retype it to fool ib author into thinking a change was made. for the intro page, you are likely to have to drop you intro movie into the widget again to make a change. i think both of these would fool iba that an actual change was made to that page, unless he has some special high level checksum intelligence which requires a real change twice, once to change and one to change back. my wild theory is that export opens to the last changed page. i have to think there is an autosave done before the export, but to be on the safe side, save explicitly after you make the change.

every thing that you tried did not make a change to the actual book, so whatever is telling it where to open is not changing. of course, preview does not work this way, but export is no preview.

i have no idea whether this theory will bear fruit. if not and no one steps forward with the definitive answer (step 3 above), then it is time to call apple support if this is critical you you. if you bother to try this, i hope it works for you. i think it is worth the try if you are the experimental type.

best of luck again on your book.

thanks for the reply. i thought perhaps you disappeared into thin air.

i hate to tell you this, but i would have preferred you did not choose the intro media page. i mentioned that this might be harder. now i would have guessed it would work, but perhaps this is a special situation since it is a page quite different from the other pages. here is what i need you to do and to follow these instructions exactly.

1. make the change to the first user page. in my books, that is the copyright page. i don't know what it is for your book, but it will be the first page under the line on the thumb nails to the left. under the glossary in a normal book. i need you to change a word, not delete a graphic and reimport the same thing (although i would guess that should work), but please change a text field. save. now either preview or change it back and save then preview. preview to the mac, not the iPad, although that should not matter i would hope. still, preview to the mac.

i actually ran this test with preview to the mac before my first post to you and it controlled the page which opened. it should work the same way for you. if not, i will send you a crisp $100 bill. monopoly money of course.

do not intermingle exports, a cigarette break, texting to a friend or taking a selfie when you do this. it should take only a few minutes. i won't be able to sleep until you tell me the answer. fight club.

it would help me know what version of of mac os you have and which version of iba you are using.

i just tried it again with preview to mac. i made a change to a page somewhere near the end. i actually imported a keynote presentation into a widget on that page, replacing an older version. i don't remember if i saved or not, but then i previewed to mac and the book opened to that page, as i previously described. however, iy might have also been the last page that i had looked at in the book also when i viewed the book from the ibook shelf.

i reached a checkpoint in my editing of the book that i wanted to see it on an iPad. i deleted the old version off my iPad and then synced in the new version. i was surprised that it opened to another entirely different page, somewhere near the middle. i am guessing that it might have been the last page that i had looked at on the iPad, at least one week or more ago. perhaps that information is saved somewhere on ibooks software.

i did go to an entirely new page and looked at it then closed the book. when i reopened it went back to that page, consistent with taking you back to the last page you were on. that would be expected behavior. i opened the first user page, a copyright page for me. closed the book and reopened it. i thought it would take me to the copyright page, but instead it took me to the intro movie. maybe that makes sense, i don't know.

i will play around with it some more, but i have to think that ibook software is controlling where the book opens (opens to last page viewed).

it might very well be that ibooks controls where the book opens. to the last page viewed the last time you opened it.

i think the key is that the book opens to the last viewed page while in ibooks is the normal behavior. this is probably what you would want and probably been designed that way. i would think that information would be kept in ibooks software, perhaps via some preference file.

a new version of ibooks might very well change this, depending on how it is coded.

what happens if you generate a new version and whether the behavior is the same on the mac versus the iPad is anybodies guess, and new versions of software can easily change things, whether intended or not. the behavior under these circumstances probably does not really matter, as your audience will not be using iba on your book. they will use ibooks and the behavior at the beginning of this posts is what they want. if not, they have the choice to go to a page of their choice when they open.

i had noticed that a book didn't always open where i thought it should but never gave it much thought. unfortunately, there are bigger problems for me to focus on. thanks for posting this observation as now my understanding is likely a bit better.

thanks for the thanks. all too often one spends a lot of time trying to help people and you never get any feedback at all. in this case, i learned a lot too.