ePub 3-Page Spread

Question

I've been doing a bit of research on the ePub 3 format as I am planning on archiving some older magazine and newspaper scans and want to craft some ePubs as a learning exercise. I also want to understand this stuff in order to help develop a JavaScript ePub reader.

I have a magazine that includes a 3-page poster in it, but I can't get the spine(s) for the poster to render properly.

I've tried using properties on the spines:

<itemref idref="034" properties="rendition:page-spread-center" />
<itemref idref="035" properties="rendition:page-spread-center" />

But, iBooks on OS X and iPad display this as regular pages in-line with the rest of them. For example, pages 34 and 35 should be displayed as individual pages, however they are being rendered with 34 on the right of 33 and 35 on the left of 36.

Am I misunderstanding what the page-spread-* is supposed to do?

I also tried using page-spread-left for both of them, to no avail. Ideally, I'd have the poster broken up into 3 pages (e.g. 034-a, 034-b, 034-c) and have the reader render a 3-page spread (page-spread-left, page-spread-center, page-spread-right), but I don't believe that is how the IDPF spec is defined. That is why I'm trying to figure out how to just display a single spine in the middle of a spread layout. (I've also tried removing the spread meta property depicted below).

Here is some additional information regarding my custom ePub file:

Package (OPF):

<package prefix="rendition: http://www.idpf.org/vocab/rendition/#"
...
   <meta property="rendition:layout">pre-paginated</meta>
   <meta property="rendition:spread">auto</meta>

com.apple.ibooks.display-options.xml:

<display_options>
   <platform name="*">
      <option name="fixed-layout">true</option>
   </platform>
</display_options>

Answer 1

I am definitely no expert here, only started coding recently. But I feel like a 3 page spread is unlikely but I have a suggestion: Use a program, like Photo Standard(dont know if that is a popular one people might know) to cut the middle page of the spread in half and then add the halves to the the right and the left pages of the spread, respectively to their own place. So it is like only two pages to the e-reader, but visually it is three. Maybe it will work, not really sure if that is really related to what you are asking. Hope it helps.