Quote:
Originally Posted by Gary J
I do not yet own a portable reader. I do all my e-reading on a desktop. I read MS REader, Mobi, Palm eReader and Adope (sorry, Adobe) but more than any other format I read HTML. Good old, non-DRM'd reflowable, resizable, HTML. Which portable readers properly render those files?
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HTML is great for a browser, but, it lacks certain features that eBook formats need. For example, there is no pagination concept in html at all. You can have lots of documents that link together but it's not pagination. Emulating that feature is trivial, sure, but it needs to be standard. The other big one is that there is no standard package for a single file to contain many html documents that then link together.
So, ePub is an eBook format that is based on the same sort of web technologies as HTML, but provides the missing parts that are important for electronic text packages like books or what have you.
Using the right tool, such as calibre or some of the others referenced on this page, it is trivial to take an html file and convert it to html. It shouldn't be much of a stretch to do the same to a set of html files as some online texts are distributed.
If I was just getting into this portable eReader market I'd look for ePub support then look at the various tools that are dedicated to conversion because I believe that will provide you the best experience in the end.