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I think that HTML is underrated by some. Certainly packaging has its difficulties (since the content may have many files and is not compressed), but the widespread support makes it a useful format.
Indeed I've been looking around for something that will let me convert epub back into html. Calibre does not do it well (its convert to zip sort of does it but loses a lot more than necessary). The best I have been able to do so far is: expand the epub (it's just a zip file) and then use the free vHtmlMerger program to put all the html files into a single file ... and then edit that file to put back in the UTF8 header stuff and fix certain links etc. It's far from perfect but until I get time to write my own solution it seems the best I can do. (Note that Windows does have some built-in support for handling html files with a subfolder of used images etc, a well written utility could take advantage of this feature to make handling simpler for the user.)
Why would I want to convert epub to html? Because I wanted to produce PDF files from the epub, after altering certain aspects of the css (adding background etc). The neat thing about html, over epub and similar, is that you get to load the entire book as a single html page and skip around searching for things etc. It also means I can simply print to my PDFCreator virtual printer to produce the useful PDF file for my ereader. (Why PDF not epub? Because the epub viewer on the sony reader doesn't cope with background images while the PDF viewer does.)
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