View Single Post
Old 11-08-2010, 09:33 AM   #1
wsuetholz
Junior Member
wsuetholz began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 4
Karma: 10
Join Date: Mar 2010
Device: fbreader
Confusion about EPub dates in metadata

Hello, I have some questions about the proper date tags to use when trying to setup the meta data for an EPub generated from scraping the chapters from fan-fiction sites. This means that stories can get updated/modified, and we will want to regenerate the story when that happens. We have 3 dates to be concerned with...
1) First posted date (initial publication date) (2010-11-01)
2) Last updated date (current publication date) (2010-11-03)
3) Date story was packaged (optional) (2010-11-08)

In Calibre, he defined a special tag named calibre:timestamp which is used for the publication date. For example:
<meta name="calibre:timestamp" content="2010-11-01T00:00:00"/>

The EPub specification suggests tags like this:
<dc:date event="publication">2010-11-01</dc:date>
<dc:date event="modification">2010-11-03</dc:date>
<dc:date event="creation">2010-11-08</dc:date>
<dc:date>2010-11-01</dc:date>
However, ebook readers and calibre don't seem to recognize the above.

There doesn't seem to be any standard between various ebook readers as to what date to use for various things.. I can see the possibility of having event names like "1st printing", "2nd printing", ...

Why didn't the date entries get defined when defining the spec?

Or did they, and I didn't notice?

In that case why did the author of Calibre feel that he had to specify his own timestamp type?

What should I be using?

What do the various readers use?

Thank you,
Bill
wsuetholz is offline   Reply With Quote