I'm still confused. I was originally merely replying to Tom Gewecke's post saying that with the 1.1 update you could read PDF books. That is now, and that's what I said.
I merely point out that just because you can't sell a pdf book in the bookstore, that doesn't mean you can't read one in ibooks. There are many, many publishers selling pdf books already through other outlets, and I'm not sure that the bookstore is some kind of panacea for getting the word out (it's not like the app store where you can't use it if it's not from there), so I guess I don't quite follow the idea that you HAVE to get your book into the bookstore to get sales for it. O'Reilly does okay without. 🙂
Personally, I think that unless one is quite comfortable with XHTML and CSS, epub is really best suited for a novel at this point, or you should hire someone who knows what they're doing for production of a more complexly formatted book, if you aren't willing to dive in and learn all about divs and spans and all.
If it were me, I would save an iteration of my book document with a name variation indicating that it were intended to end up as an epub. I would then open the copy and scroll through until I came to a table. I would then use the keyboard shortcut "shift
control+command4" to give me crosshairs to take clipboard captures of my table, then set my blinking cursor inline with the text flow and paste the clipboard image (command+V), followed by deleting the active table. I might set the image in its own paragraph and center that.
The biggest problem I see with this workflow is that it means your tables will be relegated to images and completely not searchable, which may or may not be a major issue.
It is true that pdf doesn't scale well, but then so far I've not found anything much in the bookstore with heavy formatting that doesn't break pretty severely if the reader plays around with the font size–captions and headings moving to the next page and so on. So I guess it's six of one, half a dozen of the other at this point.
