PDF in iBooks

Apple iPhone - PDF in iBooks.

I suspect the answer is going to be it has to be the first page of the PDF, but I'll ask anyway.

Most PDFs I save into iBooks, like programming cheat sheets, my daughter's school crisis plan etc. Don't have a first page that lends itself to a nice iBook cover to display while on the shelf. That means I've got 30 some odd PDF books with covers I cant really make out what it is and there's no 'title' like apps on the home screen has. So it's usually pecking through a couple to find the right one.

Now, while I could get a PDF editor and make nice front cover pages, I really don't want that hassle.

So here's what I'm wondering. Books in iBooks, which I realize are a different file format that don't have a cover art page get a plain brown cover with title and author. I would love this fir my PDFs.

Now before anyone jumps the gun and says, well, that's just the way it is, I can assure you it's not. Perform this simple test. Take a nice big PDF file and give it a meaningful name. Stock Trading Tips.PDF for example. Now load it in iBooks. You'll notice that while it's parsing through the PDF fir the first time, it creates the same plain brown cover with an easily readable title reflecting the filename. Once it
finishes parsing, you get a thumb of whatever the first page looks like.

So, finally, here's the question. Is there a setting somewhere which will use the plain brown cover with filename as the title for PDFs? If so, where may I find this beast?

iPhone tutorials
It's as you suspected. If the first page isn't a cover image the only way to have a cover displayed would be to edit the pdf and add the cover art to the first page.

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This isn't the most elegant solution but it works for me on the Mac. I create a Word document (it could be created in any text program) that has one page. On that page I put the title of the pdf file, format the text nice and large and then File-->Print-->Save as PDF. I then open both my original pdf file and the newly created file in Preview. Drag the single page of the new pdf file onto the top of Preview's sidebar. This now adds the new file as "title" page for my pdf. When I bring this into IBooks it's easy to see the titles of my files rather than little micro-views of the first page.

Like I said, it ain't elegant, it should be easier, but it does work. At least on the Mac.

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At least it's a free option.

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Been my problem for a while now too.
So, we have to do trial and error in opening PDFs in iBooks for now.

I also hope a rename feature is available at least for the PDFs

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Sounds like a apple script job grab file name add to text doc, save as pdf add to front of original file. Can't be that hard...

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There's a list view in iBooks. I was going to go into detail but I just opened the app and found--nothing on my shelves. No PDFs, not even Pooh. Good thing I switched to GoodReader a couple of months ago. It does a better job of organizing and displaying PDFs than iBooks anyway.

If you have occasion to open PDFs with large, complex graphics pages, may I recommend TransitMaps. It stores them in a tiled form that opens and navigates fast. The LA Metro map used to crash ReaddleDocs, and iBooks wasn't real happy with it either. TransitMaps makes it a pleasure to use.