PRS-650 Calibre and periodicals on PRS-650

[IvoSenden]

Very happy with my new PRS-650 and as always happy with Calibre to manage my books.
I have just one question, maybe someone can help me out.
I use Calibre to download a few daily newspapers, which are converted nicely to epub format and then sent to my PRS-650, where I can find them in a collection called 'News'.
The PRS-650 has its own main menu item, next to Collections, called Periodicals.
Is there any way to have downloaded News from Calibre formatted so that it will be recognized by the PRS-650 als a Periodical, instead of a regular ebook?

[robertpolson]

What preset do you use to convert files to epub to read on PRS 650 for books?

[polly]

How do you tag your periodicals? Have you tried tagging them as Periodicals to see if Calibre will put them in that folder for you?

[fyre182]

http://docs.sony.com/release/PRS650.pdf

page 70?

I was wondering this myself. I won't get my reader until Wednesday, so I'm not sure if that will work. If you find a solution, please post it!

[IvoSenden]

Well, I tried tagging them in Calibre as "Periodical", "Periodicals", and "Periodieken" since my 650 language setting is Dutch, but it will only create a regular Collection with that name.

As for the conversion, Calibre is set to convert the downloaded news to Epub format (it used to be LRF, but my 505 rebooted very often when opening LRF news files) and it uses the following meta data:

{tags}/{authors} – {title}

@fyre182: I looked at the instructions on page 70, but also no luck. I can open a collection and choose the option of adding content, but this will only let me add books, since I don't have any periodicals.
But even if this option would work, it would only let us add content to a collection, not to periodicals.

[Kolenka]

Periodicals on the Sony aren't plain ePub. They have a couple extra metadata files that need to be present and populated before it will pick it up as a periodical. I dont think calibre ever got the support to do it, even though I sent a couple samples to the author awhile back when the 900 was new and I wrote my own RSS->ePub tool.

These "special" epubs really just enable the jumping to next article functionality in the Sony, and work fine on other ePub readers.

[IvoSenden]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

These "special" epubs really just enable the jumping to next article functionality in the Sony, and work fine on other ePub readers.

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)...

[Kolenka]

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)...

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

[IvoSenden]

Originally Posted by Kolenka

Maybe you skimmed my post a little too fast

yup, I was a little fast there. Thanks for the explanation. I guess we'll have to be patient and hopefully find this feature in a future Calibre release.
Meanwhile, I just have my RSS feeds from Calibre sent to my reader into a News collection and look them up there. It's still faster than walking six stairs down to my mailbox and pick up a newspaper

[Kolenka]

Well, since the format is known, someone could contribute a patch to Calibre as well. I'm not sure how much time I've got to contribute such a thing though... I've got other programming projects in my spare time that generate enough hate as it is.

[johnnyb]

Anything would be much appreciated! As I wrote in the other thread I'm subscribing to a German weekly and the extra control options would be of real use there since the articles are often rather lengthy and skipping them in the middle a nuisance via TOC...

[jj2me]

Originally Posted by johnnyb

... skipping them in the middle a nuisance via TOC...

You could try press-and-hold to quickly skip pages, then release when you see the next article. I'm not a PRS-650 owner, but when I tried it on the PRS-600 in a store, it worked great, always stopping just where I wanted it to, never overshooting.

Although skip to next article would be better. Thanks also from me, Kolenka, for the explanation. Skip to next article works great on the Kindle 3.

[johnnyb]

Originally Posted by jj2me

You could try press-and-hold to quickly skip pages, then release when you see the next article. I'm not a PRS-650 owner, but when I tried it on the PRS-600 in a store, it worked great, always stopping just where I wanted it to, never overshooting.

Although skip to next article would be better. Thanks also from me, Kolenka, for the explanation. Skip to next article works great on the Kindle 3.

Thanks, that's what I do right now... Navigation in newspapers from Sony is still much more convenient though (I'm looking for a way to be able to implement this in regular ePubs, I started exploring the file already, see https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67736)...

[Amalthia]

is there a way to delete the default collections? or rename them?

[Kerfuffle]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

is there a way to delete the default collections? or rename them?

When you are in the Collections screen, press the options button and you get the choice to create a new collection, delete a collection or rename a collection. But, some of the default collections (Purchased books, Unread Books, Periodicals and maybe some more) cannot be deleted (which is a bit of a PITA as I would like to remvoe those ones).