Title Page Confusion

[thewitt]

I've just finished editing my eBook with Sigil, and then I discovered that it's on it's last legs and the author has advised that we move to Calibre. I understand that another author has picked it up, but that's not why I'm here. I was reading the Editor User Guide for Calibre and found this text:

E-books typically have a cover image. This image is indicated in the Files Browser by the icon of a brown book next to the image name. If you want to designate some other image as the cover, you can do so by right clicking on the file and choosing Mark as cover.

In addition, EPUB files has the concept of a titlepage. A title page is a HTML file that acts as the title page/cover for the book. You can mark an HTML file as the titlepage when editing EPUBs by right-clicking. Be careful that the file you mark contains only the cover information. If it contains other content, such as the first chapter, then that content will be lost if the user ever converts the EPUB file in calibre to another format. This is because when converting, calibre assumes that the marked title page contains only the cover and no other content.

Where is the Title Page used as a Cover page? I cannot find any reference to this in the ePub guidelines and the comments here really are confusing me.

I have a cover image of course, and the information on my current "title page" is the copyright, author and publisher information.

[eschwartz]

Hmm, that description seems a little strange to tell you the truth.


If you right-click on an HTML file, you will see an option to "Mark %s as cover page" -- this will mark a page as the embedded HTML cover. It usually contains nothing but an image file, which is marked as the cover image.

Both of these help ereaders display a cover. The cover image is used when extracting metadata, and the cover page is often given special powers by the ereader. For instance, it can be rendered in the Metadata ToC, and sometimes is the location that should be first opened to.

The semantic value "titlepage" is nothing special, any more than the "colophon" page. You can mark the first page, after the cover image, as the Title Page, if you like. Few if any ereaders will care.
It is the equivalent the page in a paper book that lists the title, author, and publisher. It usually comes right after the obligatory meaningless reviews, and the Also By This Author page.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by thewitt

I've just finished editing my eBook with Sigil, and then I discovered that it's on it's last legs and the author has advised that we move to Calibre. I understand that another author has picked it up, but that's not why I'm here.

Not quite true actually. Development was just slowed. There are some additional programmers now and development is progressing. A plugin system has been delivered and more work is in the pipeline.

Continue with the Calibre editor if you want, I just wanted this to be clear. Some prefer Sigil, some prefer the Calibre editor. It makes no real difference in the end product.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Continue with the Calibre editor if you want, I just wanted this to be clear. Some prefer Sigil, some prefer the Calibre editor. It makes no real difference in the end product.

And some of us use both, e.g. I prefer Sigil's spell checker because its faster with large dictionaries, I also find its Reports feature useful.

And I have Sigil on a couple of systems where I don't have or need calibre.

BR

[thewitt]

I hope it keeps going because I really found Sigil comfortable and simple to work with. I'll keep using it as long as it's stable and seems to be advancing along with the standards.

[eschwartz]

Never really used reports, but I do find Sigil's semantics editor easier.

calibre does have a nicer Code View.