Easiest way to duplicate a book content (book.module)

Hello everyone,

Requirements:

* I have a Developer's Guide as a Drupal book, collaboratively edited by the development team.
* As we have released the product version associated to this Developer's Guide, the book needs to be 'branched'.
* I would like to duplicate all of the book content into another book (copy of Developer's Guide), including images uploaded with upload.module and displayed with inline.module.
* This would really mean copying the images so that changes to images in the copied book are not seen in the original book.
* I am willing to loose revision information. Only the head revision of each node need to be copied to the new book.

Solutions:

* Am i able to achieve that with the 'Export DXML' and 'Book Import' modules?
* Has there been any PHP scripts written (not modules) that you know can do this job?
* If no to the previous questions, how hard do you think this would be to code? I have a couple of modules already written and am beginning to get comfortable with the Drupal internals.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who requires this feature to make the book feature viable. How are the Drupal books maintained in regard to the different Drupal versions in production use?

Thank you very much,

Starman