"For storing, well you cannot go wrong with html and multiple backups (blank dvd's are cheap, and e-books do not take much space especially if you zip them, so you can backup in 2-3 formats or more just to be safe)"
I don't like just HTML since the meta data etc isn't inherently part of the format in a fixed way... so maybe I can convert to HTML to make it easy to read in a browser, ... but I'd rather my storage format be a real ebook format.
Space is an issue, .. my ebooks don't currently fit on one DVD (and last time I burnt a DVD it took 6 hours on my laptop). The books might fit on one DVD if I didn't have multiple copies of so many of them. I have them on an external hard drive, and would rather have them on my laptop. When I get an ebook reading device, I'd like to buy a couple of 2gb SD cards and have *all* of my books on SD cards, but it's a cost difference if it takes 2 SD cards or 4 SD cards, and it's also an organizing issue in terms of how I divide up the folders over a larger number of SD cards.
But it's not just about space. I have many many copies of some books. I don't know which came from where. Some might be crappy OCR copies and some might just be conversions from various formats. Some might have bookcovers and images and be stored in format's that have preserved section/chapter divisions, whereas others (even if stored in a nice format) could have just been cut/pasted txt. If I continue to proliferate formats, then I never know which electronic copy of a book is the best formatted one. When/if I want to convert all of my books to a new format, maybe for a new device, I won't know which version to convert from.
...so, I need to decide on a single ebook format to consistently store everything in, and as I go through my books eliminate duplicate copies etc. If I'm going to have another copy in another format, ... I'd want it to be separate and distinct... like a separate temporary directory with automatically generated HTML versions to be exported to some device that only reads HTML, ... not various zipped up HTML files strewn in with a bunch of .lit and other such files.
oh, ... and, I did need to install microsoft reader in order to get book designer to run. The installation procedure there could be a lot better explained.
Also, I'm looking at the menu and wiki (
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_Designer ), it seems to be calling mobipocket books .prc files, ... which maybe is the case when a mobi book is read on a palm? So does that mean they'd just need to be renamed after being exported in order to read them as mobi books?