Hi, Maybe it's dumb for you, but I have suggestion to extend groff to export ebooks. I know that you're mainly interested in typesetting that could be printed. But this could short the way of many publishers, whose have to publish their books in two faces today. And should make your program more general purpouse.
For me it isn't hard to imagine. I think mom should be good for formatting since they have document structure macros. The work is only to format macros to xhtml request, make toc's and put it into epub container. It could be done by grohtml with/or some other tool (grohtml have some problems with mom.) I know that much of this work I can make by hand. If you aren't interested in the idea please write to me. Also you can add it to yours plan and wait for somebody who would start it. I think that you could find many interested programmers in Project Gutenberg or Mobile Read community. john