Quote:
Originally Posted by ProDigit
Most readers can read uncompressed htmls, which in audio are like wav files.
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They can?
My Sony can't. Kindles can't. Nooks can't. I don't know about Kobo devices. My PocketEZ says it reads HTML, and they do open, but the formatting is messed up & it adds random hyphenations and breaks in the middles of words without hyphens.
Most dedicated ereaders can't display plain HTML in a way that's readable.
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As was mentioned: Zip was chosen, for various reasons include widespread availability. Part of the reasoning was probably that the exact compression level isn't that important for over 90% of ebooks; they are *tiny* files. The ones that aren't tiny files, tend to be picture-heavy; compression levels don't matter much for those.
Current ebook tech doesn't have good support for *any* non-linear text, and the more complex the work, the less support there is. Ebook readers don't have great navigation options for hundreds of chapters--and the compression involved in .zip versus .7z is not a major part of that.
I do understand it's frustrating to see a standard that looks inefficient, but this one was established based on a lot of factors that no one publisher is going to care about.