Ok, so I've been still trying to make this idea work out for my needs (which might include shopping for maybe one-a-them new fancy new sonys).
I've been working with MobiPocket for the last year, 'cause I can make books for my Dad's Kindle. And I found it was hard for him to find a book he wanted on the box, if there were 300+ of them. So I hit on the idea of combining bunches of them into single books - like the complete(ish) works of Zane Grey. Or Louis L'Amour. Or Mark Twain. He now has 70 books-of-books - if he feels like O Henry today, he can open it up and navigate around in the book itself to find the sub-book he want. Easilier than page after page of books.
I've been using Konrad's SiteMap Creator
http://www.konradp.com/products/sitemap_creator/ to create an external TOC - each top-level file is a book in the TOC, then I generated a single-book-specific TOC inside each book (using Word). Sure, it's 3-4 clicks to get to a specific chapter in a specific book, but it's better than wading through umpteen pages of contents to find the same chapter (using automated TOC generation), and it's a little more horsing around to get it all to work for me, but that's ok.
So far, every attempt to build a similarly-structured book with the current generation of epub-making software has been less than satisfactory. At least, for my meager understanding of how to do it. It seems to require a lot more horsing around, and (gak) hand-coding of html, which I've successfully been able to avoid so far, being all lazy and all as I am. Comes from using iSilo back in the day - now THAT was easy to make a book for.
I see references here of things like "oh yes, just manipulate the OPF", but haven't grokked how to put it all together. I guess I still haven't seen the "ooh---aahhh" of Epub yet. Digital Editions doesn't impress me - if I've got hypertext linkings in a book, say for a footnote: where did they put the [ back ] button?
-bjc
Charter Member,
Deceased Equine Abuse Society