Is there a trick to putting books on a shelf in a non-psychopathic manner?

[Specific Beef]

I am generally not loving the controls in HF2, and putting things on shelves or into boxes/drawers is especially awful, but adding books to shelves is perhaps the worst I've found so far.

If I put a book on a shelf, my character wants to put it there facing me, cover facing the room: the design style of a murderer. If I use Rotate, it puts it at an angle facing me, instead of reorienting the spine (who would want to put a book cover-out at a jaunty angle? That's for killer cannibals). If I look down at the floor so the book is by my character's knees, I can rotate the book the way I want, but of course it flips back to serial-killer mode when I move the book back towards my eyeline, where the shelf is.

I can kind of get it to work by putting my face flat to the wall to the right of the bookshelf. Then I can get the book at 90 degrees to the shelf, spine out. However, it's not always possible to do that. If you can't get to the right because something blocks you, then you'd have to approach from the left which gives you a third form of psychopathic book storage, with the paper edges facing the room. That kind of thing might fly on Instagram, but not in my houses.

Am I missing something, or did they really program books to behave like vases?

[darsenia]

That's extremely strange. When I'm placing a book on a shelf, it places it horizontally, spine facing the room (good way to store large books), then if I press "V" button, it changes the orientation to vertical and places the book vertically, spine facing the room (alsoa good way to store books). And with a mouse wheel I can rotate the book at any desired angle.

[Specific Beef]

Originally posted by darsenia:

That's extremely strange. When I'm placing a book on a shelf, it places it horizontally, spine facing the room (good way to store large books), then if I press "V" button, it changes the orientation to vertical and places the book vertically, spine facing the room (alsoa good way to store books). And with a mouse wheel I can rotate the book at any desired angle.

Oooh, a "V" button. I might have missed something because I've been doing the tutorial jobs and jumping between controller and mouse all the time, so maybe the V control came up at the wrong time for me. I really wanted to play with controller but the XBox controls are unbelievably bad this time, and they seem to tied sensitivity to polling and also framerate to polling. If I turn it down to a reasonable responsiveness for left stick, then camera moves on the right stick become juddery. It looks like a performance issue, but it's not; I can switch to mouse and immediately I have fast but smooth frames. I still hate the controls with mouse, but less so.

I will try your suggestion — thank you! [EDIT] Yes, that was it :)