When looking at various commercial e-books you can see the e-book’s title at the top of the “page” and the current chapter’s title at the bottom of the “page” while reading it on your Kindle or (in my case) Kobo.
Unfortunately I cannot find a way to do just that while using Scrivener. Whenever I compile my project to an epub-file and want to read it on my Kobo, I have no header with the title. And at the bottom I see the number of the current page and the page number of the whole e-book, but no chapter title or the page number of the current chapter.
Since I am not able to find help in the FAQ, on the forum boards or somewhere else in the internet, I hope you can help me or point me in the right direction.
How do I insert the document’s title in the top line as a header?
How do I insert the chapter’s title and number of pages in the bottom line?
Thank you.
Help me Literature and Latte - you are my only hope!
These elements not actually features of the e-book specifically, so I’m not sure why you are seeing a different result with on ePub file than another. There is no standard way to set a header or footer, the software does that—and some do and some do not, depending upon how clean they want the presentation to be. Small displays like Kindle for the iPod and iPhone will have nothing around the page at all, just the text. My Kobo is different from yours, it is the pocket sized one, all it has is a page number at the bottom. So this is entirely up to the reader, what gets displayed or not.
That said it needs information to do that, and so if your ePub file is acting differently from the rest, then it might be that it is lacking some information, for example, do you have any sections in your book at all or is it just one long text? Does the ToC page let you jump between chapters? That is where the e-book reader would be getting this information from.
As soon as I figure it out how to find a way around that dilemma, I will post it here.
No, my final .epub-file is divided in chapters. I am going to take a look at a commercial epub with those attributes via Sigil, perhaps I can find the needed informations that way.
In my opinion it is not very important, but nice to have. And since you clarified that a lot of e-bookreaders are not able to display that, it could be unnecessary anyway.
The place to check in Sigil is the Meta-Data editor (F8). You should see the values you filled in from Scrivener before compiling. If Kobo has some custom meta-data entries that books from their store are using, that is where they should show up. If you find anything let us know. It’s not too hard to add this kind of stuff to the export.
