[ProDigit]

Thanks busybee for your affirmation.
From HTML perspective, once a book is in the library, it can easily be snatched by eg: me, who can convert it to LRF for my Sony reader; and by someone else who perhaps has a Kindle or Iliad, to convert it to their desired format if necessary.

One of the issues we're facing is that upto today almost no electronic book reader can read HTML, and/or compressed HTML (unless they are running some version of Windows CE).

Then there's the issue of different versions of zip and rar,where later versions are incompatible with previous ones.
Last time I used winzip,they where on version 8, and this was around the millennium nearly 9 years ago. Every version had an improved algorythm, compressing better then the version before. I only fear that once a reader would be compatible reading zip or rar archives, that later archives (zip or rar files) will not be compatible with the reader's internal decoder version.

winzip today is on version 12, assuming that's about a new version every 2 years, with 1 new update and 1 new version in 2008.
Winrar is about the same, currently at v3.80 doing a new version about every year.

The issue is newer versions are compatible with older versions, but older Winzip/rar decompressors are not always compatible with newer compressed archives.

Another issue "might" be that winzip or winrar may not be a good format for electronic reading devices; though I am not 100%sure about that.
meaning, in some cases the device will need to decompress the file fully before it's able to display the book compressed in it. Or,may need more computing power. Winzip/rar are much more intense then LRF,or other formats (filesizes can become smaller on winzip/rar)

I yet have to see a device that is capable of reading HTML within a ZIP file directly. That would mean hardware capable on the fly decoding capabilities. It'd probably take more than an ARM 200Mhz processor to be able to do that!

There is no DRM on HTML and archives (YET), but there can be password protected archives.
A simple methode can be incorporated by whenever a book is downloaded from a store, a password will be provided with it. Generating a different encryption on every download.
I hope DRM will not go over to ZIP or RAR!

So those are the negative points; but on a positive note, HTML compressed in an archive, is the best open format to reconvert!

I found it best to convert .doc and .rtf using openoffice writer to HTML.
Then with notepad++ take a 5 minute trim to get the unnecessary html codes removed (like eg:language, div style and some span class/font/..) .
Within 10 minutes you can have a reasonable clean HTML version of a book!
Which a lot of devices running Windows CE will be able to read, be it then when uncompressed.

then again some people will need to take a basic course in HTML encoding, unlike eg: converting a MS word document via calibre, which takes no knowledge of HTML or codes.