jim said:

So the “solution” is that all readers should buy an iphone and run “eucalyptus”

no. the "solution" is to understand that a viewer-program like eucalyptus can be programmed on _any_ platform, designed to take the project gutenberg plain-text files and display them in a beautiful (and powerful) manner. the "solution" is not to debunk that plain-text format -- which is what you seem to be wanting to do here -- and _certainly_ not invent a new cockamamie format, but rather to patch the small inconsistency problems that haunt the library so that the plain-text files are dependable and reliable in terms of delivering beauty.

I can’t disagree with that – it IS relatively trivial to render attractive text if one knows one is rendering to only one particular machine.

have you ever done any programming, jim? and, in particular, have you ever done e-book coding? even though eucalyptus is "rendering to only one particular machine", it allows the end-user to pick the font-size, which requires rewrapping the text. in addition, many apps let you switch to landscape, which means you must code for two screen-sizes... it's not as easy as you make it sound to make an app, even if it's just "for one particular machine". however, once you've made such an app, it's not that difficult to port it to another machine, or to another language, or to hack it for some specific purpose you only need today, or to modify it to fit your own personal preferences, or... but the important thing to remember as far as this thread is that the "vanilla" .txt format used by project gutenberg is extremely close to being totally sufficient as a file-format. it just needs to have a few ambiguous situations cleaned up, and then the whole library needs to undergo quality control because there are some rather glaring inconsistencies there. but we don't need a new format... never have... never will... -bowerbird