RE> "What exactly are you wanting to do that is unique and different?"
I live in Montana where connectivity is spotty too. I think this discussion has already told me what I need. I could have doped this all out on my own but here it happened much faster. Thank you all.
I want to be able to transform an epub file into a website with a utility.
http://lxml.de/ could be used to do that. Then I want to have another as yet not existing utility that could transform said website (perhaps after some manual HTML/CSS editing) back into an epub file.
That in a nutshell is what I want to do. I already have the CMS (content management system) that looks and acts like a book. I want to be able to use it to display any epub file. So I need the epub to html fragments utility.
Plus I want to be able to edit said HTML manually, on the server with a ssh connection a terminal window and vi, and then run another utility to transform that website back into epub. When ever needed. At the click of a mouse.
I hadn't realized epub3 even existed. I looked at epub, which does not support multi-media, and thought I was a long way off. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.