I'd like to create a kindle book based on some content I have, but would like to lay it out like the The Times kindle newspaper does it, with the centre button returning to the article list, which itself has a section view on the left, and the relevant articles on the right, changing based on the section changing.
I have no idea where to start on this so I don't have any code yet that I can have reviewed.
How would I go about doing this?
The Newspaper e-Book style "Contents" page is certainly a special "hypertext" script. The Guardian and Observer e-News use this also. It's a superb device, as one does not have to build a contents page; a standard TOC can fill many "screens" or pages, what a pain to navigate through, or go back to!
I'm not convinced it's a python script? If you use Calibre to manipulate the file, it will most likely remove the active script you would like to see/reuse in projects. The script [phl based on php?] is most likely embedded at the top of the news file or is in a separate file on the Kindle and behaves like JavaScript on a web page. As soon as I find how it's done, I will post an update for you. All e-books as standard should use this device as its VERY much easier to navigate long e-documents.
Take a look at a Calibre. It has a feature which is called news recipes. Basically it works like: parsing an RSS feed then combine its articles into a magazine (which can be converted to mobipocket too).
You can write your own recipe to convert local HTML files too. Even better, it has a command line interface (ebook-convert YOUR.RECIPE Your-magazine.mobi). Recipes are just relatively simple python scripts. And the API is rather well documented.
