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Originally Posted by Kivgaen
We want to be able to get our ebooks to the mobile readers out there, but since our books are quite complex, (requires lots of bridge diagrams, auction tables, suit symbols, etc), our ebooks require specific formatting. We're not really sure what direction the industry is taking right now, so we haven't started doing anything more than PDFs for the moment.
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The two most common, best-supported non-PDF formats are ePub and Mobi/prc. (PRC is what they're called on Palm OS devices; other devices can read them with either .mobi or .prc extensions.) Both are based on HTML formatting, scrolling rather than page-based layouts.
ePub is an open source format, and is likely to be the dominant one eventually, but right now, mobi is more common in the US, with ePub already dominating Europe. (EPub is growing, however, because it's open source, and because Mobi ebooks are often made with limitations established when PDAs were the common ebook readers.)
By poking around the Mobileread forums, you can find several discussions weighing the pros & cons of the various formats.
If you convert your books to well-formatted XML files, they'll be much easier to convert to other ebook formats. There are even ebook standards to help with that, although I don't know enough about them to offer specific advice. If you decide your books are really just too layout-intensive for HTML, you might consider making some in ebook-reader sized PDFs, with roughly 3.5"x4.5", or 90x120 mm, pages, so that they're easily readable on all the 6" ebook readers, which is the most common size.
There are also plenty of discussions here about fonts, font sizes, margins, and conversion processes, and you can get an idea of what dedicated ebookers--the people who buy notable amounts of ebooks--prefer, and are willing to pay for.