There are many services that do this already, it's best not to re-invent the wheel. Lots to think about, scan every page, write code to import into Flash dynamically, accept parameters to go to a given page, categories, more. Active Point Easy Flip is one of the ones I know of.

Active Point Easy Flip

This looks pretty good, but this service along with many others I found need to host the "book" for you once it is converted into Flash. I want to be able to convert it and then host it on my own web site without the user leaving my site to go to a place where the catalog lives.

My company bought one of those stand-alone, self hosted catalog generators. The price was astronomical. I wish they'd consulted me before they paid.

Those flip catalogs and their features require a lot of miscellaneous files to support the pretty page turning effects. You may be better off with a remote hosted service if they upgrade features. I wish my company had gone with remote hosting for that. It's a pain to support and upgrade anything.

My company bought one of those stand-alone, self hosted catalog generators. The price was astronomical. I wish they'd consulted me before they paid.

Those flip catalogs and their features require a lot of miscellaneous files to support the pretty page turning effects. You may be better off with a remote hosted service if they upgrade features. I wish my company had gone with remote hosting for that. It's a pain to support and upgrade anything.

Bill, thank you, I was uncovering similar stuff as I was researching, but it is always good to hear directly from someone that is experiencing it directly. I will look into the hosted solutions.

Interesting this all comes up - I was tasked this week with looking at magcloud.com and issuu.com, both of these services may be along the lines of what you need. And issuu.com, I believe, has a reasonably priced standalone distribution (so I was told, it's on my todo list.)

issuu.com is great
Or yudu

There are some stand alone software that wont cost you more then 395 but I believe the hosted versions stream better

There are many more I have allot of research in the past year so if you need help ////

Yeah do tell RealBrisk. :-) I just went through both of those, it appears issuu.com has a strong API interface, but cannot be externally hosted (from what I can tell.) yudu.com *appears* to allow external hosting but haven't heard form them on complete costs, however, doesn't seem like it has a strong API. Their site is not real informative.

magcloud.com is a closed system, it's really built for physical publishing as an end result with flip books as a by-product.

Still digging for other options too.