[rogue_ronin]

Page numbers make zero sense. It's positively medieval.

The reason page numbers make sense in paper books is because you are referring to a particular object/edition, right? (Then you're forced to hunt down that particular edition in meatspace.)

The only way page numbers make sense in an ebook is if you do something similar: state the publisher, the edition, but then you have to start jumping through hoops: the specific hardware, and the specific margin and font settings, (and probably more that I can't think of) so that you can force the pagination.

Or you use only the paper book as your model, and hardcode page numbers into the book. Which, as Amalthia vigorously points out, is annoying and unnecessary.

Or there has to be a universal "paper page model" that everyone uses, becomes a sort of underlying "indexing format" and bury the page numbers in metadata.

I guess you could combine the above two, and use the paper book as the referent and bury the page numbers in the metadata. But if there is no paper book...

A simpler solution is something along the lines of Publisher/Document/Section(Chapter , Appendix, etc.)/ParagraphNumber. Or even simpler, just Publisher/Document/ParagraphNumber, with all paragraphs numbered sequentially from the very beginning. Tables and Images, etc. simply have the preceding and/or following paragraph indicated. Computers are very good at counting.

And you don't explicitly display the paragraph numbers, just work them into the attributes in the underlying format (preferably XHTML).

The hardware readers have to start allowing you to turn display of that data on and off, or make it possible to jump to numbered paragraphs. But that's not too hard.

m a r