Welcome, Clemenseken, I'll take a shot at a couple of your questions.
I prefer the Sony Reader for a couple of main reasons. The first is that I just want to read e-books, and I don't need all the extra capability that the iLiad offers (others do, and I'm glad they have that option). The second reason is that I prefer not to
pay for all that extra capability that I don't need or want in the first place.
As to using HTML on the Reader, there are a number of apps around this forum (HTML2LRF comes to mind, off-hand), that will convert HTML to something usable on the Reader. But then again, you can always just open the HTML file in Word (or some such program) and save it as an RTF file, which the Reader will handle nicely.
The Reader will show jpg, gif, bmp, and ... I
think png (it's been a while since I looked at the specs). But the extra bit of information there, is that it won't show pictures inside of e-books unless the e-book is a PDF or LRF. If you just want to display some pix, it's got a separate album function for that.
Sony hinted that they were planning to release an SDK, but there hasn't been anything on that for a while. However, there is a thriving developers community, thanks mostly to a fellow who goes by the name of igorsk (there are several others also working hard, but igorsk just recently got us a way to change the firmware ourselves). You can see what they're up to
here.
You can definitely find a lot of info on MobileRead (in case you haven't found it yet, there's a search function toward the upper right of each page -- I didn't notice it for a couple of months myself
), and I hope you have as much fun finding it as I have.
