Okay, here is a dummy version of the book, with every small character replaced with x's (not very beautiful, but the best I could come up with to keep size and everything else as true to the original as possible). Scrambled the cover, and only included the first 4 stories.
I kept the comments on the cover page, so that you see it on page 2 or 3. If I remove the comments, it goes to page 1 as intended, as pdurrant said. But the question remains, why does this really happen?
So if you want to read a lot of x's, here it is
Comments on my code and structure are very welcome.
[EDIT] It was validated, and ADE displays it okay, put epubreader seems to have a problem with things like &xxxxx;which are remnants of apostrophes I would guess... This problem exists only for the dummy book of course, not the original one.