James Adcock wrote: [snip]
Why do people buy an ebook reader when presumably they also almost all also own a computer with an HTML browser? Answer: the ebook reader gives a better more book-like reading experience. Why MOBI or EPUB format and not HTML? Because MOBI and EPUB formats understand what is necessary to make an ebook reader "book-like experience" work IN PRACTICE -- HTML does not.
Not quite. As most people understand, both the MOBI and the ePub formats are little more than compressed collections of HTML files. This is why PG can produce MOBI an ePub files on the fly; if an HTML version exists, just add a few metadata files, compress them together, and voilà, there's your e-book. Just as an experiment, download an ePub file but save it with a .zip extension; you should be able to use your favorite zipping tool to explore everything that's in it. Your confusion probably arises from the fact that /software/ which is designed explicitly to deal with ePub or MOBI files is /also/ designed to display the interior HTML in a way that makes it more "book-like" (e.g. page-oriented, with new pages starting at the beginning of chapters). If this same software is presented with basic HTML frequently it will display it in exactly the same manner it did the newer compressed formats. The old MobiPocket reader could actually open HTML files directly, and once opened you could not tell whether the e-book was in MOBI or HTML format. I also know from experience that the first generation Sony readers would also render HTML just as easily, and with the same presentation, as their own proprietary LRF format. My favorite software, µBook doesn't recognize the .epub extension, but can read HTML from inside of zip files, so I just save ePubs as zips and µBook handles them just fine. So, if you are looking for that "book-like reading experience," you should be more concerned with what software you are using than what file format you are downloading. There is plenty of software available, for a multitude of hardware platforms, much of it free, that will display basic HTML using the "book-like", paginated paradigm. On a related note, if you are producing an e-book, and you want to make it accessible to the largest audience, you should also focus on HTML, as it is the well-spring from which virtually all other formats can flow.