I've had a search but couldn't find anything on the forums so I'm either being stupid or I'm the only one who can't work this out.

The books I've got on my iBook bookshelf show in alphabetical order but they start with Z and at the bottom are numbers and A. How do I sort the order on the bookshelf? Also, for some strange reason there's an M right at the end.

I have no idea.... I know in the "graphic Bookshelf" view they seem to be almost random. One of several reasons I do not use that view. In the list view when I choose title, author or category they are in the correct alpha order.

As I said, I don't use the bookshelf view. It's pretty, not not practical....

thanks. I have the same correct viewing in list views but not bookshelf view.

Seems like a major bug to me, although I guess my "real bookshelf" isn't exactly in alphabetical order either.

So the answer is to not use the bookshelf view.

Can't you rearrange it via the edit function?

Yeah you can and when you've only got 10-20 titles that's not really a problem but when you've got nearly 500 and they're in a random order it's not really an option. Just seems odd that they don't appear in alphabetical order in the bookshelf view as standard.

It seems like the bookshelf display are ordered by date time descending. I guess you can have artificial Sort Name and Sort Artist (in iTunes) to be tie breaker, but you would still need the books in your sort group to be of the correct date time stamp. so if I have a bunch of books by 3 different authors, I would use touch or something to change the date time stamp so books by author 1 would have one set of time, books by author 2 would have another set of time, and so would books by author 3. But now if I want to force the publish sequence of books within the same author, the artificial Sort Name with the same Sort Artist would help. In this case, for author 1, I would have Sort Name A001, A002, A003 .... etc, regardless of the actual book title, but the order in which I want it to appear.

The problem arises if you keep adding new books, you would have to force the date time stamp of the newly added books in a way that would fit your ordering scheme. Manual arrangement by edit function works though could be time consuming (since I want publish order by favorite authors), but every OS update reshuffled it.