al said:
>   My personal practice is

and therein lies the rub.

the p.g. e-texts are rife with "personal practice".
and the d.p. e-texts are soaking in it right now...

one thing you have to know about pagenumbers is
some people need 'em and other people hate 'em...

which means you have to have 'em, and you have to
give people a way to shut them off...  _totally_ off...

the only way to do that is to establish a convention,
so viewer-app developers can make everyone happy.

most "personal practice" implementations try to walk
the tightrope between the two sides, and fail _both_,
in the sense they don't do the _full_ job that the "pro"
people want pagenumbers to do, but yet aren't nearly
as non-invasive as the "anti" people reasonably want.

if a hundred different digitizers do it a hundred ways
-- or a thousand digitizers do it a thousand ways --
nobody is gonna end up happy; we'll all be miserable.

and face it, if both sides are going to end up unhappy,
you might as well flip a coin and make one side happy.

the only way to make it work is to do it _one_way_...
so developers can target the convention successfully.

michael isn't going to prescribe this remedy for p.g.
even if he tried, he probably would not succeed, and
he has made it clear that he doesn't even want to try
and do things like that, as per his basic philosophy...
nobody else has a remote chance of success with p.g.

so alas, it is not to be.

but perhaps it doesn't matter.

because it's becoming increasingly clear that the only
cyberlibrary that's going to matter is the google one,
and -- after a few missteps at the very beginning --
google has gotten pretty smart about pagenumbers...

so whatever conventions they establish will stick.

***

but, to answer the question...

gardner said:
>   Is there any suggestion what
>   a formatted text-only book that
>   retains page numbers should look like?
>   Is it reasonable to just sprinkle them
>   into the text, maybe something like this:

there's nothing difficult about the issue, technically.

you wouldn't want to "sprinkle them" thoughtlessly,
but any number of _well-specified_conventions_ can
handle the tiny number of wrinkles that do crop up...

(tell me if you want me to dredge my memory-bank
to catalog them, but there seriously aren't too many.)

-bowerbird