Custom Categories in iBooks
So, the iPad has finally arrived. I'm probably enjoying mine more than I should be.
I find myself particularly drawn to iBooks with regards to technical books. I am incredibly grateful to The Pragmatic Bookshelf and O'Reilly for making previously purchased ebooks available in the epub format, the format native to iBooks (as well as many other readers including Stanza, the iPhone app that had this capability a few years ago).
As much as I have been enjoying this app, I've been frustrated with how the seemingly arbitrary categories sort the books when viewing the them in list view. One such category was:
COMPUTERS / Hardware / Personal Computers / MacintoshSeriously? Not only this, but the formatting was awful! Some were in partial caps while others used slashes and other various characters. It turns out the fix was really simple!
The Fix
In iTunes, under the Books library, start by right-clicking on an ebook and selecting Get Info. Heading over to the Info tab reveals the answer. iBooks is apparently using the Genre of the ebooks as the categories!
Meh. Okay, I can see how that makes sense. Come up with a way to logically organize the ebooks you have and go to town! I found that the technical books I currently have seem to fall under 'Web Development' and 'iPhone Development'. Much better.
Next complaint
I'd love to see categories make their way into the shelf view. There's currently no way to sort the books found in this view.