Most volunteers just continue with their regular ebook production, without even knowing about all of this fun exchange.
One CAN run PG volunteer produced txt files, and html files (which get compiled into epub and mobi files) on a wide variety of PCs, MACs, Un*x machines, wide variety of browsers, IE8, IE6, Mozilla, Opera, etc, wide variety of devices: Kindle, Blackberry, cellphones, iPad, iPod, Nook, Sony Reader, etc. Will the files display the way the volunteer expected when they wrote that file while viewing it on their FooBar 1000 ? Nope. But will it be readable and usable? More-or-less. Typically the LESS effort the volunteer puts into fancy-formatting the file, the MORE likely it will end up appearing readable and attractive on some device other than a FooBar 1000. The question is, do "we" "PG" care, and if we care what should we be doing about it? Or what CAN we do about it? Looking at the HTML its pretty clear some of it is hand-authored, and some is authored using tools. Don't know what you can do to get anyone to change their tools, or convince them that their choice of tools just might be less than ideal. You could probably tell people the problems they are causing a) if they cared and b) if they would believe you when you tell them they are causing problems for the people who in theory would like to read their books. Unfortunately, most instructional books on HTML and CSS are negatively helpful re these issues. Two books I have found that talk pretty honestly about these issues, and which make moderately useful suggestions are: EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders (One-Off) by Elizabeth Castro -- which is a pretty iPad-centric book. And: Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide To Formatting Books For The Amazon Kindle by Joshua Tallent -- which "obviously" is a pretty Kindle-centric book. But both of them fundamentally talk about the challenge of writing HTML or XHTML that actually displays more-or-less correctly on a large number of different devices. When we see a bunch of volunteers making the same mistakes over and over again, should we tell them? Or (as others are proposing) should we play "bad cop" and tell them in the future the only file format PG is willing to accept is txt70 with a few additional markup rules? Again, the statistics backing up these issues (if anyone believes those either) is, roughly speaking: 30% of the PG readers read on an HTML browser 30% on a Kindle 30% on a EPUB machine and 10% everything else, including PDF and TXT files. Of people using browsers, the statistics are roughly: 40% IE 30% Firefox 15% Chrome 6% Safari 2% Opera And of operating systems used: 83% Windows 9% Mac 2% iOS (iPhone and iPad) 1% Linux What's the point -- if I have one? Namely, "The PG Pundits" are typically NOT well-matched to the needs of the customers. The PG authorship more frequently uses "different" authoring environments than the customer. And that -- if "PG" cares -- there is a very wide variety of customers out there using a very wide variety of machines that interpret and display PG files in a wide variety of different ways.