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I quite agree. Nor is this rocket science. I like HTML because it is open-source, commonly used, and therefore isn't going to go away. It can do the job as well. Maybe not perfectly for really fancy formatting, but good enough. RTF is not open source but very common and easy to convert to HTML if needed. PDF is more for images than text, and is not open source, but is very common and what it is needed for, it does well.
Gower software's mu-book reading software has been out for years on the WinCE, and reads HTML, RTF, TXT, and some other formats (not PDF). It does it well, and I have had no complaints after having read a 1000 books on it. Which is why I've wanted a WinCE based e-ink reader. For mu-book software.
But what do we get? Half-baked firmware, slapped together in a hurry, that sort of works, so they can shove it out the door. Maybe I'm paranoid, but why hasn't some firm checked with Gower and asked? "How much to port your software to my machine?" The only software that seems to work well is the propriatary format reader software on the machine. So you can be trapped on a single vendor machine, with a pile of books you can't convert to anything else. HTML will be around 20 years from now. Anyone want to make book on LRF or DRm'ed MOBI (or even Kindle) formats for the same time frame? And for those who say "who cares?", I have pieces of software that are 25 years old, and still work fine. Software is immortal, as long as you can find hardware to run it on. E-books should be the same way.
Finally, nobody wants to go back and fix the limp-along software they already have, unless its for a highly propriatry format (like MOBI). They just add new formats, (probably just as limp-along) and boast about the new formats.
When, oh, when, can I get an e-ink machine as good as the CYbook gen1 I bought in 2006?
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