I work at a newspaper, and the Indesign licenses we have there allow for a home-based copy. Which is why I don't have Incopy - we don't use it at the office (Word, instead).
I'm no pro with Indesign. Rank amateur. The built-in "book" templates produce truely aweful ebooks - the styles all convert to the cover page styles, and come through in red ink. At least, I can't make it work.
New blank page, import Word document (import html doesn't seem to be an option, though one can drag the html document into a text box.) For an ebook, you don't really even need to add pages beyond the first one - the whole text converts from the original document. Probably wise to add pages and link text boxes, just to make sure you can see what you're doing.
Sometimes the styles from Word import and propagate ok, sometimes they don't. Can't tell why yet. If they don't, one needs to rebuild them into indesign - otherwise weirdnesses and disappointments ensue in the epub.
Hyperlinks in the original word document (even into itself) do not work in the indesign-generated epub. So hyperlinked footnotes made by word are out of the question. I don't know how to get them to work in indesign yet. Since my disappointment factor continues to rise with this, I may not care much longer.
An yes, a large-scale project (say, the
Babylonian Talmud) is impractical at best. (Funny, it was bloody easy with
Isilo. And it worked properly and looked ok, too.)
And I think that if you're using the index.zip tricks, you're actually using the browser's css implementation, not necessarily the epub subset. Which is why the emulators and dedicated readers look different - they aren't on the web, and they aren't full-fledged browsers. Maybe they should be.
I have been the actively-hating-DE list for some time. The Sony viewer is a reasonable facsimile of what sometimes happens on the 700, so there is some value to looking at things in it. The best software reader on a pc by far is Calibre, but it apparently won't port easily to pocket pc (boo frickety hoo). And as there is no scripting protocol in epub, it is even difficulter to have the document compensate for different reading softwares, as web developers get to do.
Another thing I was hoping would work out in epub that doesn't: css breadcrumbs are right out - needs javascript. So we can't use that to see where we are in the book....
-bjc