What I really need is probably a little more than a 500-hour project, fersure (especially if executed in C++) but here's the gist: I'd like to have a way to generate a fully paginated pbook print image (basically, a PDF) as well as all the major reflowable ebook file formats
without losing pbook page equivalence.
In other words, I want there to be page markers in my reflowable ebooks that map to page boundaries in my pbooks. I know that most of the reader utilities in their current releases won't know what to do with the page markers (which is their bad--they should have had them from the beginning) but I have hopes that vendors of reader programs will come to their senses and allow end-users to jump to numbered page locations in a ebook independent of font size or any other display parameter. If there's a page 42 in a pbook, there should be a way to quickly and easily jump to the equivalent spot in an ebook edition of the pbook, a spot independent of text flow.
This pretty much requires a tagged PDF file as an input if you're talking about laying out books in one of the major publishing apps like InDesign. I'm pretty sure that .epub/IDPF has the machinery to represent a paginated print image with all elements semantically marked, but until InDesign, Quark, and Frame can output an IDPF-compliant file of some kind, publishers wanting to generate print images as well as reflowable text files are stuck with tagged PDFs.
One of my nightmares is a future day when I can't cite a passage in an ebook from print because there's no standard
human-readable way to specify a location within the ebook. Print and digital will be coexisting long after I'm dead, and I haven't yet figured out how to make print and digital coexist without relying on page numbers. There's a lively and interesting thread on this topic elsewhere in this forum that spun off some good insights (as well as a certain amount of heat):
Page numbers in ebooks for scholarly research?
I'm seeing pieces of a solution all over the place, but no one has pulled them together yet. You could do worse than be the first. (And whatever you end up doing, please keep us informed!)