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Some books or periodicals from Amazon Kindle store have this cool feature that shows a breadcrumb or title bar when you read them. It shows up as the first line of the text. It is not the bar that has the battery and wireless signal icons. It is that first line underneath, right above the content.

For example, if you are in the middle of chapter 2 it shows the title of the chapter in that line. It is really cool and I would like to implement that in my books.

I have proper TOC, cover and start page. I followed the guidelines in Kindle Publishing Guide. Actually, I am using KindleGen to convert from "on-the-fly" generated EPUB. I am mentioning this to weed out simple RTFM answers. :) In all the guides I read, I have not found anything that mentioned described feature.

The books that have that feature are encrypted, so I can't find out how they work by looking at their files. Another thing, they are in AZW format, which supposed to be just MOBI renamed. Perhaps the described feature is exclusive to Kindle?

I thought I would ask the Kindle/MOBI/EPUB gurus out there: How can I implement such a feature in my own books?

Mike Starov
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  • Sorry, I'm not even sure if we have a site on the StackExchange network where this is on topic. –  Nov 03 '11 at 12:56
  • This is programming. I use PHP + XSL to pre-process DocBook XML with DB data then feed it into ruby script to generate EPUB file and then convert it into MOBI. :) – Mike Starov Nov 03 '11 at 15:25
  • I'll take you at your word. Can you edit to clarify the programming aspects? –  Nov 03 '11 at 15:27

1 Answers1

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For HTML formatted then insert a proper TOC in it. (Read here: http://www.mobileread.mobi/forums/showthread.php?t=129364 and here: http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq.html#what-s-the-deal-with-table-of-contents-in-mobi-files and here: http://72.21.206.224/kdpforums/message.jspa?messageID=74957 )

Then use Calibre to convert it.

EDIT:

sorry for the misunderstanding. So you're problem was caused most probably because of the so called MOBI header, offset 24 (mobi type). If it's set to 257, 258 or 259, you will have the navbar.

The best(?) you can do (if you really want it in an e-book) is to create a Calibre (news) recipe for the conversion (docs here and here).

Within the recipe you can set the publication_type.

Or you can dig into the calibre source code (mostly python), and patch it to set the publication type differently.

This is a good resource as well.

HTH

Community
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Zsolt Botykai
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  • I read through each article and all they point out is the need for TOC. I never mentioned that I lacked TOC in my books. I have both HTML and metadata TOC. I am asking about the breadcrumb/titlebar feature in particular. I might have missed it, but I could not find a single mention of that feature in the linked articles. – Mike Starov Nov 03 '11 at 15:28
  • Thanks for the information. This will get me started. However, it seems like the header is only supported on "news" type items. I don't really want to change the mime-type for my books to "news". I am afraid there might be some unintended consequences. – Mike Starov Nov 07 '11 at 18:10
  • As far as I remember correctly: maybe you can't add a "news" type item to your (Kindle) collections, and when you upload a new document to the Kindle with the (relativly) same name & metadata, the original item goes to the Previous Issues collection (not sure about the name, as I'm now without my (beloved) Kindle. – Zsolt Botykai Nov 07 '11 at 21:47