Quote:
Originally Posted by IvoSenden
In my humble opinion, there should be another difference, because "regular" epubs also offer the ability to jump through articles by cursor keys or touchscreen. My guess is there's some kind of nametag in the meta data which makes the Sony reader recognize this epub as a periodical. Too bad Calibre doesn't offer this function (yet)...
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Maybe you skimmed my post a little too fast, I mentioned that these ePubs have extra metadata. It's this metadata that enables it all (detecting as periodical, sorting by periodical, date, etc, and the advanced navigation).
You can use a TOC to enable most of the navigation, and why Sony doesn't use that I'm not sure. It uses an atom feed inside the ePub to drive it's navigation (splitting up by section/etc) and the atom feed references various pages inside the ePub.
The problem with a raw ePub is that navigation is built into the TOC and XHTML only. This means if you are on page 2 of 3 in an article, you need to bring up the TOC or navigate to the next/previous page to get at the controls in the XHTML. Sony's implementation does address this particular drawback with extra controls on the reader's display, driven by this metadata.
Calibre's ePubs that are generated from RSS feeds have the core structure fine, but it lacks this little extra bit of metadata that turns on Sony's extras. And there is nothing terribly secret about the metadata either.
If you want to know the gritty details of the additions Sony has made, take a look at this thread I started shortly after the 900 launched explaining it:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67736