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Originally Posted by STEM
Thanks!
I very much appreciate your detailed response.
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You're welcome.
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What I don't appreciate is having to do all this work over again. 
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I don't blame you, but I fear you're stuck with it if you want ereader users to actually
use the material you offer.
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Yes something like that. All e-readers work on an OS and some have browsers: e.g. the Kindle. This Linux OS & browser seems to be more than a bit crippled. It is possible to have an image of a web site on a local machine - PC etc., so that the browser seamlessly recognises the web site though it is off-line. With Windows you can do this without a second party program, and set a site up which the OS and browser recognise as being located locally at http://localhost/ - IP address of 127.0.0.1
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On Windows, I don't need to go through that. All I need is a bookmark to the local resource using file:// instead of
http://. And I have large quantities of HTML content stored locally which I can simply click to open, as my default browser is specified as the handler for that type of file in Windows file associations. You can pass any browser a file spec or a url on the command line and expect the browser to try to open it.
But don't limit the consideration to just dedicated ereader devices. Any awful lot of ebooks are consumed using viewer applications on tablets, smartphones, and the like.
And the reader is a dedicated appliance, designed to do a particular thing, so it
will be crippled compared to a general purpose device using the same OS. Things
not related to what the device is intended to do will be absent, even if the OS can technically support them.
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I don't care how it is achieved, the easier for users the better for me!
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*cough* conversion *cough*
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I don't suppose that there are many folk who would enjoy rebuilding 1,000's of files into a mobi or other format. Only to find that another format pops up . . . . and another . . .
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Which is why sites like Project Gutenberg provide more than one format. We're stuck with that, too.
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If the device has a browser (Kindle), surely it should be possible to 'force' the OS & browser to recognise a locally hosted website. Then users can access the files/pages/books in exactly the same way they would on a web site - no learning curve! Free-flowing text, choice of fonts/sizes and all the other benefits.
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The device may not. Or it might have a different idea of a file system than you are used to. Or it may have a browser that
can't open local content. (I have a device with a browser like that.)
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I may be naive but this seems so obvious to me. I can see that Amazon want to sell books and their primary commercial reason for a browser on the Kindle is to enable people so to do, any other browsing they give is a bonus selling point. They have no real interest in enabling folk to get books elsewhere. I feel that the e-readers which will have long-term success will have a decent browser, and not be tied into an Amazon/Apple/Microsoft/Adobe proprietary solution. But mebbe I am VERY naive
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It's quite possible to side-load content not encumbered by DRM and read it on a Kindle, as long as it's in Mobipocket format (which is an encapsulated subset of HTML.)
For that matter, it's possible to side-load content in ePub or PDF on devices that support those formats and read them using the device.
And the Kindle browser is capable enough that there are a few folks on MR who participate
from the Kindle.
I've no idea if the Kindle browser can be told to open and display local HTML content (I don't have or want one, and can't test.), but it isn't what I would want to do if it could. I'd want to use it to read ebooks in the format it was designed to display. The browser would simply be a tool to help me locate and acquire them.
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(I like the Sony e-reader touch screen, I do not like the clunky Kindle navigation, I would be rather surprised if the Kindle does not feature touch soon, I think colour should not take over but could be an optional model)
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Color is an evolving option. eInk doesn't really support it. (There is a flavor of eInk that supports 12 bit color, but only one manufacturer is sampling devices using it, and the color offered will be insufficient for many applications.)
Full color is easy enough to achieve if you don't use eInk, but you lose eInk's advantage in battery life. There are several technologies that claim to address that, but none are in widespread usage yet.
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Dennis