Display 500 jpg Book Pages

I want to put a book up on my site - it is a tech manual of some 500 pages and they are all scanned in as jpg images.

the viewer will want to be able to enter at the beginning of any chapter and from there scroll rapidly through the pages to find the page they want.

There are 22 chapters. Some only a few dozen pages, a couple with more than 100 pages. So clicking on 'Next Page' is not an option.

I currently have a working algorithm that does that: allows starting at the beginning of a chosen chapter and from there one can click to go 'Next Chapter', 'Last Chapter', 'Last Page' or 'Next Page' and though it works it is not reasonable to expect anyone to go through those big chapters with this methodology.

It is written in PHP

Any ideas? Any existing algorithms/code ?

Sounds to me like you just need to add options to skip to a specific page; and a specific chapter. I don't know how PHP works w.r.t. images and whatnot, but a cool interface would be to create "clickable" areas in the contents and index, allowing the user to click on a specific chapter/page, and go right there.

Viggy

My first though is to avoid developing the interface at all. Either generate a huge 500-page PDF available for download (there are many tools you can use to accomplish that task given a set of jpgs). If that is too big, you could create 22 PDFS, one per chapter, and leave them available for download. Everyone is already familiar with navigating PDFs for information, so might as well leverage that user experience rather than painstakingly designing your own solution.

That doesn't quite answer your question, but I hope it points you in the right direction towards solving your problem more generally.