i mentioned my "zen markup language" earlier in this thread.
it was designed with the ideal of taking a plain-ascii e-text
-- exactly like the ones that you find in project gutenberg --
and (via some automatic handling from the viewer-program)
transforming it into a powerful fully-functional electronic-book.
another benchmark is turning it into .html for view on the web.
you can now go to a website to see z.m.l. in action:
>
http://www.z-m-l.com
on the "examples" screen, you can click on the links to
see the plain-ascii z.m.l. file that is used as the "master".
you can also click each button to see the .html file that is
automatically generated from that plain-ascii master file...
from that .html, of course, you can generate a plethora
of other formats as well. the point is that the "master"
is in a plain-ascii format, and thus can be distributed with
all of the ease and convenience that such files give to us.
(production and maintenance of files in this format is also
a breeze, owing to this plain-ascii nature, since there are
tons of tools out there capable of handling files like those.)
in the evolution of e-book formats, some light markup format
-- whether it be z.m.l. or "markdown" or "textile" -- will win...
the days of heavy markup -- like docbook or .tei or .oebps --
are finished. they are too complex for the average person,
and us little guys are not about to sacrifice the revolution that
the web gives to us, which is that _anyone_ can be a publisher.
-bowerbird