Tone matters, too. While I agree with many of your points, the way you express them is increasingly disagreeable.

Alexandre: Nice post, especially your reminder to Bill of the limits of browers.

Bill: This Great White is worth pursuing it and indeed killable. Perhaps the real Ahabs are those who oppose open standards and think their proprietary standards will prevail–either openly or through their pet DRM schemes.

Brad: I agree that the presentation isn’t perfect. In the near future I’d really like to reinvent the TeleBlog, but for now I’ll focus on content–while leaving the Skweezer option for those who want to get rid of the styling.

Thanks to all,
David

Some of that could be ameliorated if the page came closer to being
good HTML, rather than having scores of errors. http://validator.w3.org/

Two errors are most annoying: hardcoding the text to an 800-pixel wide display, which leaves swathes of emptiness on the sides at higher resolutions, and the misbounded comment box which spills over to overlap the rightside column. Disabling styles (Ctrl+Shift+Z in Firefox, Shift+G in Opera) or the skweezed link does fix those, at least.

I think that consumers have chosen their tool for reading ebooks, and that tool is the Web browser (no, not the Plucker reader ). The World Wide Web is one of the most influential and effective tools for cross-cultural communication ever invented — perhaps even more effective than Esperanto in this regard. People actually read — hungrily — e-publications formatted as “Web sites”. And I think that people who are interested in furthering the cause of ebooks should take that into account, and look for ebook strategies that utilize it. I’m guessing that strategies which don’t do that are doomed to irrelevance. But hey! Maybe I’m wrong!