I'll admit to being a little surprised to see so much support here for hard coding the layout of eBooks. Given the myriad eReading devices that currently exist, a number which is only going to increase, surely it is pretty much impossible to code the layout of a single file such that it appears equally good on all eReaders? Are people really prepared to spend time reformating and hand-tuning their eBooks again and again as they upgrade their devices?
I thought HTML had taught us all about the disadvantages of integrating presentation instructions with content. If people are going to devote time to marking up books then I think they'd be better served marking up meaning rather than presentation. Defining your eBook in terms of logical book elements like title, author, chapters and footnotes makes more sense than adding font tags and layout tables.
I believe that presentation should be handled by software on each eReader - the reflowing of text, widow and orphan detection, hyphenation, etc. could therefore be tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of each device. CSS shoud be supported so the designer can exert some control over the display and provide an attractive default presentation but the reader should be able to override this with their own CSS files if they feel it necessary.
I've been looking at the epub spec recently and I found it supports the DAISY standard - which was originally designed as a way of marking up a book (in terms of t-o-c, chapters, appendices and so on) so that it can be rendered into braille or interpreted by text-to-speech engines. It's XML so it can be formatted into readable text (for display on an eReader) using CSS files included in the epub container.
I'd urge anybody interested in converting pBooks to eBooks to take a look at the
DAISY standard. Consider the advantages of only having to mark up a book once such that it is readable on all epub devices
and accessible to the visually impaired.