[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by STEM

Where is the weeping icon

We don't have one. Pity - it would be useful.

'Other devices'
Yes, I have been concentrating on making lots of good material available in xhtml which seems to be the most universal format so that many systems/devices/programs can use them.
Potentially easier to convert in bulk with their CSS.

It's my preferred storage format, because it is easy to convert. In my case, my normal reader is a Palm OS PDA, and I get content in HTML and convert for reading on the device with Plucker, an open source offline HTML viewer for Palm devices. (It has a web browser, but the default browser supplied with it can't open local content, doesn't support JavaScript, and falls over on most CSS.)

I do appreciate the desire to keep reading pure - I have thousands of real books and I work from home so I can read them easily

So do I. The advantage to ebooks here is the ability to carry a library in my pocket.

I am surely a bit thick that I cannot see why html presented, black on white, text in e-ink is not a good reading experience . . . . ?

In fact, on readers, that normally is what you are seeing. MobiPocket uses an encapsulated subset of HTML. ePub is a container, and XHTML text is one of the things it may contain.

The issue isn't the HTML - it's the file it's in. If I'm using a dedicated reader device that supports a particular ebook format, I'll probably want all of the ebooks I read in that format, so I can use one interface to select and read them.

For instance, I mentioned I use a Palm OS PDA as my primary reader device.

The advantage, aside from the fact that it does a lot of other things besides display ebooks, is that there isn't much I can't read. Aside from Plucker documents, I can read MobiPocket files, eReader files, Adobe PDFs, Word and RTF files, and plain text files. The only format I don't have native support for is ePub, but I can convert that to Mobi if it isn't encumbered by DRM.

The disadvantage is that I have to remember which book is in which format, read by what viewer. There's no way to have the entire library selectable from one interface,.

Just to continue with my (false) humility - please explain:
*cough* conversion *cough*

Sorry - just a way of indicating that you would be stuck doing conversion.

It looks like I start a lot of work or start a lot of waiting - I am much better at the waiting than the working - decision made! . . . mebbe.
Thanks again!

The biggest work would be learning what's involved in doing the conversions. As mentioned, it can be scripted, once you have the tools and have written the scripts, and the computer can do the work. It's getting the tools you need and writing the scripts that will be time consuming.

Off-topic: Isn't it great that paper is still the best! Years ago I came across a news item that the British Library had digitised the Domesday Book or something equally priceless - and within a few years the computers could not read it

More efforts like that are in place. With luck, XML will become the standard storage format. Once in XML, it's much easier to get it into the output format you need.

(I started using AmiPro3 - remember that? - better than Word2. Then Word, then I got fed up and went non-proprietary to html. Gnashing of teeth that slightly older Word version cannot read docx natively - but OOo doesn't even make a fuss about it. I only use Win for OmniPage)

I recall AmiPro. I began in the MS-DOS days when WordStar was the WP of choice. I kept some fluency in it because many text editors either used the WordStar command set or could be told to, and I didn't need to retrain my fingers. (I had Gnu Emacs customized to use WordStar commands at one point. )

I have Office 2007, but have OO3 as well in part because it can deal with DOCX files. Nice to be able to do that under Linux. (And in typical MS fashion, DOCX is an XML based format with proprietary MS stuff tossed in. "Yes, we support standards! Do it our way!" Er, no.)
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Dennis