"Content Cartel" haha... I'm talking about ease of use, not keeping something closed. That's why I said that eventhough BBeB is pretty good, it should be more open source to be more widely used.
User should be able to customize the content, but if it's necessary to modify the content on the user side to make it usable, then it's really wrong.
RTF and HTML are not better than PDF for e-books, they all have their own issues.
An e-book format should be based around the elements that a book is made of: if you don't know where a chapter start and end, and you just got something like a bolder font for the chapter name, well you won't be able to make anything out of it (or maybe create regexp and some kind of robot to scan each and every book ? That's stupid...). But if you have something like <chapter> </chapter> wrapped around it, you can easily create a TOC, make it really easy to create another file in a different format out of it, enable the user to easily customize the book etc... Plain text files, and storing your book using absolute formatting is both wrong: you need to store important informations about the book and then format it with advanced features. I see PDF files as an output for one of these XML based formatting using "book tags", instead of "formatting tags". You could easily do such an output for HTML too but it would be limited compared to the PDF output. Basic formatting and book elements should be based on an XML format, and advance formatting, how the book looks and feels should be somehow similar to CSS stylesheets, you could use different "themes" for every content.
PS: Added a quick example of something that I could output on Feedbooks.
The PDF example is here:
http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/view_book/35