Quote:
Originally Posted by BobC
Perhaps if you were to explain what you mean by "Static Pagination" it might help - to me it appears to conflict with the concept of reflowable text which you also want.
BobC
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Hey, Bob:
Sure, it's Ye Olden Holy Grail of reflowable ebooks with indices and x-refs that still, somehow, magically work. Naturally, this doesn't really exist.
@martinger:
As BobC points out, you are stuck in cognitive dissonance. The very nature of reflowable ebooks is that the content moves. This means that there's no such thing as "static pages" or references. The only way around this is to use pseudo-PDF's, like Amazon's "Print Replica" format (which is essentially a PDF, for all intents and purposes).
We ran into this when some of our clients, like Al-Anon, wanted to do ebooks, but wanted to be able to use the x-refs and discussion guides that went with their print books. It's just not viable. You can either a) manually create all the links, inside an ebook, so that every topic can be "jumped to," or b) tell your users to use the search features to search for a string of text, or a reference number (like an Outlined number, e.g., I.A.II.b, etc.) That's about all you can do.
The whole "pagelist" idea sounds really good--but I'll tell you right now, when someone asks us to do this, it's going to be expensive. It's not fast and easy to track every single page-top (in which version? Hardcover? First Edition, Second, Tenth, Paperback?) and manually mark it. All you can do, if this is what you want, is to do it that way--you search for the first line of each page of text, and you create the list element, and put the links in,
one at a time, and x-ref to the PageList. This will only work, BTW, on ePUB3 and/or HTML5 readers. AFAIK, this has to be done by hand. (If not, I'm happy to hear from anyone else who has a better way.)
IMHO: I would only consider doing this for books in which searching for a string is simply not possible, due to the labor involved.
P.S.: if you think PDF's are easily copied, you really,
really ought to read up on DRM and ebooks.
I hope this helps.
Hitch