How to use Sphinx to give an old book new life

One of my pet projects is to combine my love of historical cooking and my love of open source by leveraging open source documentation tools to produce polished, web-based versions of 18th-century cookbooks. When I am done, these books will be fully searchable and have hyperlinked tables of contents and indexes. To accomplish this, I have turned to the Sphinx documentation builder, which provides me with a simple way to create, organize, and build functional HTML books with little effort, and as an added bonus, use Sphinx to create PDF and EPUB versions just as easily.