Reading a book with hundreds of pages is painful. I don't see why scrolling is any more painful than turning pages. (The Mobipocket reader for Palm also has an auto scroll option which just scrolls the text slowly by, which could be a nice feature in browsers.)
We've had that in Plucker for quite some time also (and Plucker's format is openly documented, unlike MobiPocket's format). Related to that, you CAN have autoscroll in your browser (again, making the assumption that you're using a standards-compliant browser). http://autoscroll.mozdev.org/
One advantage of print is the ease of bookmarking a spot -- something that can't be done easily on most ebooks, although I'm working on a simple HTML solution.
We've got bookmarking, and we're adding cross-document bookmarks and interlinking in our next version. We've been thinking about these (and other similar problems and solutions) for quite awhile now.
I also now provide a single HTML file version and a multi-page version of my ebooks. Usually the multi-page version splits the work into chapters (or whatever is the major division for the work).
I do the same for my HOWTO documents, sourced from SGML. One call each with with jade or sgmltools will generate the multi-document version of HTML or the single-document version. I run that through hindent and tidy for a few passes, and out comes properly-validated XHTML (mostly). You can see what one of those kinds of preparations looks like over here. This particular work is only HTML4.0 Transitional, and not fully validated yet, but you can see what I did with the stylesheet and general output of the SGML: http://faqs.gnu-designs.com/pokerfaq/ The mobile version is over here (with screenshots): http://plkr.org/news/46
The multi-page version was mainly intended to make online reading easier -- there's less to download for each chapter. It also means that Google is more likely to index the content -- they have, I think, a 100k limit per file.
Funny you mention that. I've been doing some SEO work on my HTML version of the 9/11 Commission Report, and the original chapters I converted were 100+k and more, many of them into the 200k and 300k range. I took some time to split those up into their own subchapters. You can see THAT work over here: http://911.gnu-designs.com/ I put a ton of hand-editing and automated work into this particular effort. With over 7,000 downloads of the mobile formats I've created from that work, it seems to be quite popular. It is this same level of quality that I am striving for with PG works I convert.
Something that large really needs to be split.
We agree. David A. Desrosiers desrod@gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com