[heatish]

I think ePub's can handle everything you mentioned, ePub's are just XHTML, and a subset of css [1]. Not sure about callout boxes, I don't know exactly what subset of elements are available as I've never written one, but everything else you've mentioned looks to be available [2].

Fun epub file trick: rename the file .zip, unzip -a yourbook.zip (double click unzip doesn't work on osx for me for some reason) and check out the html, css, images and xml of your book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB [2] https://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/elements.html

[joemi]

While ePubs can handle more complicated layouts, it's much easier to take an existing print book layout and export to PDF and have it retain the formatting than it is to do the same with ePub. So to export the same layout to ePub, you basically need a web designer to go over it and mark up the parts correctly and write the right CSS. Exporting to PDF is pretty much one step and you're done.