stephen said:

One advantage of print is the ease of bookmarking a spot -- something that can't be done easily on most ebooks,

depends on the viewer-program.

although I'm working on a simple HTML solution.

ok. :+)

most browsers can easily accomodate the complete, single-file version of the average work, up to a MB or so.

that download is downright painful if you're on dial-up. and if there are images involved, it gets even worse. and -- at least on some browsers, not naming any names -- when c.s.s. is used, the formatting doesn't seem to get done until the whole file is downloaded, which is a huge handicap. (and every time you resize the window, you have to wait again.)

Something like Don Quixote is a bit more of a problem as a single file, being large in text size and also carrying many illustrations, making the total download many megabytes. Something that large really needs to be split.

or downloaded as a zip and read offline. and even then, it can take a while for a browser to load and display it. if you want, i can do some actual timed trials on my mac; i suspect that the results might surprise you. in general, i've found speed in computers is very easy to get used to; it's difficult to remember how slow an old computer was, unless you actually fire it up and deal with it once again. when you do, it'll usually dumbfound you how slow it was, and you wonder how you ever got anything done at that pace. same with broadband. put a bunch of techies back on dialup, and they would understand why the masses are slow to adopt -- the systems the techies are building are simply unusable... -bowerbird