[pittendrigh]

RE> "the why part"

I am writing a book about boat building and fly fishing. It won't be profitable. Not much anyway. It's just a hobby I'm having fun with. I do NOT want to share royalties with a traditional paper technology book publisher or with Amazon or Apple. I want to make no money my own way. All by myself.

I have a website. I want to put my book on my website, in a way that looks and acts like a book. I'm a retired programmer with wide ranging skills. I think I can do this. I sell digital boat blueprints online so I already have my own web-based DRM system to work with. I've been selling digital blueprints since the late 1990s. Have a domain name that goes back to 1998. Readers cannot read the digital blueprints without buying a password.

I want my books to act the same way. Online. Available to any user on any device with any browser. If they want to download the epub and read it with Readium or Calibre they could do that too. I'm just widening the audience a bit. Overlays, now that I think about it, might not be all that hard either. They are defined and mapped in an XML file. And PHP does XPath nicely.

These discussions always help. I appreciate everybody's feedback.