Colleagues have been asked to convert a large pdf archive (about 150,000 items) to ePub and Mobi (keeping the pdfs, too, of course).
I ran a few newish ones through Calibre to find the pain points: TOCs need deletion and recreation, tables dissolve into lines of text, extra line spaces become flush left periods. And of course the older pdfs are images, so there's no point to the conversion. Might as well retype...
If they do need to figure out how to do this after reporting all of the issues, I wonder if there are any known ways to automate any of the tasks involved. If each document needs individualized editing, the project looks to me like it will take years. Anyone interested?
BTW, I'm the only designer in the group; the others are archivists, data processors. So only I use InDesign (OS X); they use Windows 7 (I believe) and MS Office. No XML pros either as far as I know.