Going through the archives in my mail box the last few days I wanted to add my .02 as someone who is not as close to the project as any of you. I think that any XML work (if Gutenberg goes that way) needs to be done in addition to, not in replacement of plaintest. I don't care if XML becomes as common as plaintext and everyone uses it, you can run into a problem in 20 years where XML falls out of favor and there won't be software to render it properly. This will lead poor fools having to redo all the documents all over again. This is not a good thing. Picking plaintext is genious in the sense, that unless basic ASCII changes (not likely compared to XML losing favor) plaintext will always be able to be read. This allows it also to be read on older machines. Maybe some of you don't care that the guy with commodore 64 can read plaintext but can't read XML because he is only one person on the planet. But when you see all the other 1 person implementations add together it becomes a decent percentage. My thoughts on a software to do the annotations would be to have a read that could overlay annotations on the screen but maintain the base document in plaintext or maintain a seperate annotated edition. The problem also we come into when we discuss modern annotations is who do we decide who is qualfied to release (write up) the annotations for a certain book. I may not agree with the annotationist that Bob likes, and Sue will hate the choices bob and I will make. The best solution I could honestly see to keep a degree of sanity is to Wiki each book you wanted to annotate. But I'll go back to reading now the archives now, I just though plaintext still needed a champion before the whole world went completely XML crazy. Remember - plaintext was supposed to be replaced by Postscript plaintext was supposed to be replaced by word perfect plaintext was supposed ot be replaced by word plaintext was supposed to be replaced by PDF plantext was supposed to be replaced by HTML plaintext is supposed ot be replaced by XML? Not bloody likely