um, go with zip. tools handle it well, and the masses know what it means... i have also done a lot of work making a compressed format, one that my tools use seamlessly; they will also convert it to the other compressed formats (like zip, gzip, bzip, tar) if you (or the end-users) want it to. (except why would you?) in addition, because of how my compression format is structured, an app doesn't even need to "uncompress" it in order to display it. therefore, it blows away other compression formats in timed tests concerning the tasks that are most relevant to e-book performance (these include _searching_, pagination, jumping to a random page, formulating a full-on concordance, dictionary lookup, and so on...) so compression is pretty much a done deal. you can stop worrying about it, and just go do more books. when you can give me 25,000 english e-texts in plain-text files -- using however many d.v.d.'s it might take you at the time -- i'll be able to hand them all back to you on a single d.v.d. -bowerbird