[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by STEM

If I can find my way to it I will transfer the request, but local hosting possibilities on e-readers was my interest - in order to read free-flowing text and avoid huge re-formatting work.

I looked at your site. You're a specialist in Christian related literature, with Bibles, bible commentary, and writing on Christian topics. For those interested, it looks like a valuable resource.

But I'm not clear on what you mean by "local hosting". It sounds like you want to create a copy of your site, possibly as a zip archive, that interested readers could download and browse locally without requiring Internet access.

That's fine, if they have a PC/laptop/notebook/netbook with sufficient storage, and a capable browser to view the material. (I could create a local copy now using HTTrack). It's much less fine if they have a dedicated ebook reader, or ebook viewer application on a PDA, smartphone, or tablet. Storage and browser may be issues.

A larger issue is reader expectations. Folks using readers tend to want individual books, in the native format (MobiPocket/ePub/etc.) supported by their device, created to display optimally on their devices, with things like working hyper-linked tables of contents.

If you really want to provide your content to ebook viewer users, I fear you are looking at conversion if you want people to actually use the resources you want to offer. Places like Project Gutenberg, ManyBooks.net, Munseys.com and others offer a variety of ebook formats, handled by scripted conversion from HTML source. While it's a large effort, it can be automated, and is probably what you will need to do.

I rejected pdf more than 15 years ago because it was page-based (IMO many of the problems with Adobe products over the years is that they never left their DTP roots behind), and I considered that for digital use a screen-based format should be free scrolling, free-flowing to window screen width(s).

It's possible with current versions of Acrobat to create PDFs with tagging that let the viewer reflow the text for the device screen. Most PDFs are not so created, and some viewer devices (like the Kindle DX) that can display PDFs don't support the feature.

Programs need to have a clean page turn/scroll to give a satisfactory experience - many do not! I wonder if any one has thought to put a temporary (changing each time the page-down command was given) marker line on a scrolling page to show where the previous page/window end-point was?

I haven't seen that. But being able to specify a scroll overlap (IE: show the last line or two from the previous page/screen on the next screen when a page down operation is requested) is common enough.
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Dennis