Apple Books on iPad incorrect books sorting

[Pargeo]

Hi,
I am trying to make Apple Books on my iPad sort the books in my collection according to Creator - File As metadata contents but Apple Books seems to ignore the attribute completely and instead sorts them according to the contents of the main Creator field, so JK Rowling precedes Robert Conquest and Victor Hugo follows Jack London.
Is there any way to make Apple Books be aware of the File As contents? Or, maybe, make it sort the books by authors correctly in any other way?
(short of rewriting their names in reverse order, i.e. last name - first name)

[Cootey]

TL;DR You can’t change this currently, I’m afraid. Apple doesn’t allow you to edit the author tags of DRM’d ebooks, and their author sorting is fairly dumb. If the publisher entered the author as “A B” instead of “B, A”, you’re out of luck.

Apple Books inconsistently allows me to edit some authors and not others. If the file is a PDF, I’m allowed to edit that field (View by list, then click once to select the book, wait a beat, then click again on the author field). Sideloaded epubs act as if I can edit them, but the edit doesn’t stick. In those cases, I remove the book, edit the meta tag data in Calibre, then reimport it. DRM’d books won’t even pretend to let you edit the author field.

However, since I can’t strip DRM from Apple Books, and Apple worries only about pleasing publishers and not readers with their occasionally updated software, I moved away from that app years ago and mostly use the Kobo and Kindle apps now. I just use Books to access my PDF collection.

[Pargeo]

Originally Posted by Cootey

TL;DR You can’t change this currently, I’m afraid. Apple doesn’t allow you to edit the author tags of DRM’d ebooks, and their author sorting is fairly dumb. If the publisher entered the author as “A B” instead of “B, A”, you’re out of luck.

Apple Books inconsistently allows me to edit some authors and not others. If the file is a PDF, I’m allowed to edit that field (View by list, then click once to select the book, wait a beat, then click again on the author field). Sideloaded epubs act as if I can edit them, but the edit doesn’t stick. In those cases, I remove the book, edit the meta tag data in Calibre, then reimport it. DRM’d books won’t even pretend to let you edit the author field.

However, since I can’t strip DRM from Apple Books, and Apple worries only about pleasing publishers and not readers with their occasionally updated software, I moved away from that app years ago and mostly use the Kobo and Kindle apps now. I just use Books to access my PDF collection.

Actually I was referring to sideloaded DRM-free epubs - as epubs purchased from Apple behave properly, sorting wise - but not sideloaded epubs. I edit them as required with Sigil, I insert all necessary metadata (necessary according to epub specs) - but when imported into Books (via airdrop) they are sorted as if 'File as' property didn't exist.
I prefer Apple's Books (former iBooks) because this is the only epub reader (afaik) fully compatible with epub3 that reads properly all 'hard' elements of any epub (tables, endnotes etc.).

[kfarmer]

Originally Posted by Pargeo

but when imported into Books (via airdrop) they are sorted as if 'File as' property didn't exist.

I ran into this last night, myself: PDFs that have either their Title or Author properties set will have those values used preferentially for sorting on iPad even though the Books metadata is available and used in the display. The macos app doesn't suffer this issue, and it's pretty clearly a bug in the iPad's version of the software.

I've spent a lot of time with a PDF properties editor hardcoding values.