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That is a good point.
On the other hand, I think every format so far is abysmal — for someone.
And as for XHTML, you're not traveling very far from the roost to choose that. Most every e-book format out there is derived from it or from pre-XML HTML. It's a vocabulary primarily intended for delivering text and yet it isn't rich enough.
And the rich vocabularies — Docbook, TEI — are stuffed to the gills and yet are unsuitable for general use, or even use for people outside the small domains of technical publishing and academia, respectively.
I don't fancy tacking a replacement vocabulary for handling text onto XHTML. And at the same time I recognize that any attempt to specify all the things that need to be marked up in any domain is doomed to failure.
So I say, let us agree on a framework and a small core set of elements and focus on establishing clear requirements for how content should be delivered to the reading system, and what information about the content must accompany it, and on the other hand what exactly the reading system is responsible for.
And this is for books, not the myriad of other media that also must wrestle with the issue of electronicity.
Will OpenReader do a better job of setting us up for the future? I can't say I like the way it's started if that's the task at hand. I think it stands a better chance than Sony, eReader, Mobipocket, Microsoft, IDPF, Plucker, et al., do from where they are positioned.
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