Which doesn't at all address the issue that we don't all want the same master format. There's a demand for HTML for desktops, EPUB and MOBI at the least.
And there are at least two issues for this: 1) People love the format they know and love, and have chosen it because the other formats are more difficult and ugly and more difficult to use and in practice generate inferior results on the platform that they use and love and which they author for. 2) Automatic conversion of one format to another is always a "dumbing down" process known at PG as "blind formatting" where PG has always said we will not accept files that are blind formatted because they contribute nothing. Yet that is exactly what the proponents the new super-uber-formats are proposing: they are taking existing PG books which are not blind formatted, and are now "blind down-format" converting them to the new super-uber-format. And in the process they throw away the efforts that the volunteers put into NOT blind formatting them -- because PG told the volunteers that it would not accept blind formatted files -- but now those who propose to crown themselves the Super-Uber-Users propose to do exactly that to all the volunteers' 40,000 books throwing away all the effort that went into trying to make (hopefully) intelligent design decisions about how to represent the important formatting decisions in the paper book in an electronic edition. When all that really is necessary is to "tweak" a half dozen lines in the CSS when targeting the small devices. PG already even has a placeholder for such tweaks. It's called pgepub.css and its currently almost empty, and what is in there isn't particularly "correct."