Thank you for your response, Jongware. I have, however, tried creating a transparent page in Photoshop and then making a PDF of it. It was not transparent in Acrobat Professional and did not reveal the page beneath it as one would assume a transparent page would do. To answer your question, no, I did not expect to see the electronics of my monitor; I expected to see a transparent image that masked an image beneath it; i.e. a page, although I appreciate your sense of humor.

The PDF (portable document format, i.e. image) and the SWF co-exist when viewed with Acrobat due to the Acrobat's built-in viewer. A SWF does support transparency and can be set up for pages of a book, so it is not an unreasonable assumption that it could be used to layer a PDF and provide the transparent effect. I simply was looking for a solution that someone who thinks creatively out of the box might have developed.

I'm also afraid I would disagree about the efficacy of using InDesign to create ebooks. I've been using InDesign since 1.0, as well as its predecessor, PageMaker, to create multimedia-enhanced ebooks for about 15 years and have sold these books commercially for as long through major bookselling chains. I've consistently looked for ways to be creatively unique; hence my transparency and irregular page shape queries. I really do appreciate the time you took to consider these questions, however, and thank you for that.