I did some testing. Adding a page map
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Adob...tions#Page-map to my epubs gets rid of the numbers all right. I added an empty page map - to express the exact changes I made manually to a lorem ipsum epub test file:
Code:
diff -ruN lorem/content.opf lorem2/content.opf
--- lorem/content.opf 2011-10-09 20:50:54.000000000 +0200
+++ lorem2/content.opf 2011-10-09 20:56:35.407772183 +0200
@@ -16,8 +16,9 @@
<item href="index.html" id="html" media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
<item href="stylesheet.css" id="css" media-type="text/css"/>
<item href="toc.ncx" media-type="application/x-dtbncx+xml" id="ncx"/>
+ <item href="page-map.xml" id="map" media-type="application-oebps-page-map+xml" />
</manifest>
- <spine toc="ncx">
+ <spine page-map="map" toc="ncx">
<itemref idref="html"/>
</spine>
<guide/>
diff -ruN lorem/page-map.xml lorem2/page-map.xml
--- lorem/page-map.xml 1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
+++ lorem2/page-map.xml 2011-10-09 20:57:11.407772567 +0200
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+<page-map xmlns="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf">
+ <page name="" href="index.html" />
+</page-map>
The downside is that the reader sees the entire book as a single page. So the "Go To Page" becomes useless. I'd have to write a script that somehow maps one page per chapter or puts page breaks wherever the number isn't in the way.
Keeping the page numbers as they were and just styling them invisible somehow would be the way to go, but I haven't found a way to do that.