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Originally Posted by Dru
Out of curiosity, do you find enough books available in shift-able formats to have your library available for hardware shifts? Can you find what you want a majority of the time, or does it really limit your purchases? I've been thinking about really figuring it out, but I'd like to find a standard way, so that I could batch and singly backup my purchases against format/device lock.
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So far I've not run up against any difficulty - and I'm far less expert than many people here.
I think you'll find that many format shifters buy in the Microsoft Reader format because that is fairly easily unpacked into an HTML file and illustrations. Some strip the DRM from Mobi files they own and just use the unprotected file but you can also extract an HTML version from an unprotected file with tools available here. Apart from one dictionary, I personally haven't run up against a file that can't be translated into HTML .
The HTML isn't always perfect - not least because the format of even some commercial ebooks can be sloppy. Different people tweak in different ways. I am sufficiently ignorant of things HTML that I just use Word and Wordpad to tidy up the format. So far they have done what I needed. Usually I just make sure that chapters begin on new pages, tweak paragraph spacing and adjust headings but recently I bought a commercial edition of a classic Latin text in translation, only to discover that the footnotes were not connected to the text. Half an hour's work with Word gave me a better version than the commercial original.
I use Mobi Reader almost exlusively and have found no difficulty in getting the HTML versions into that format using the free Mobipocket Creator. Others seem to have similarly little difficulty in translating to their favourite readers. I always keep the HTML version, however; firstly because it gives me searchable text and I don't really see the point of etexts if you can't search them and secondly because if Mobireader ever were to disappear I'd just translate the library for whatever new device I buy.
So the answer to your question is that so far my choices haven't been limited at all but that a little individual attention is required for each purchase rather than just processing them as a batch.