Yet another e-book format

While I understand all the initiatives to simplify ebook publishing, there will never be anything easier than just use HTML5 with all resources included in one single file. No need to zip/unzip. And if there is any shortcoming in that approach, just ask the W3C/WHATWG to include any extra feature to satisfy that need.

Another format. Yes. That will fix everything.

ePub already supports XHTML and CSS. Extending it to support HTML5 is trivial if the renderer is using Webkit...which many eReaders do. And lets not forget the importance of content and form. Having a document that looks like a newspaper out of Harry Potter doesn't improve the quality of the message. They're different mediums and the message doesn't always improve with more distractions.

Live long enough, and everything comes around.

There may have been little reason for HTML to exist - dozens of "document standards" existed at the time, yes including links, anchor points etc.

I'm sorry it was not very clear. Here's what's wrong with ePub: http://blog.widescript.com/2010/08/03/we-support-zhook/

But basically, ePub is full of bugs (that take ages to be solved until the huge committee agrees on every point), it is complex to build and debug, and does not support HTML5. Heck, there is not even a way to define a cover.

Just to be clear, HTML5 is composed of many parts. You might be thinking about canvas or video/audio, but one of the most important introductions are the new tags, that turn out to be perfect for crafting electronic publications (semantic richness). That you can use it in ePub doesn't mean you're meant to.

The point here is that HTML5 is a semantically richer format to create books. ePub uses too many configuration files that become a barrier when it comes to authoring.

If we had a decent standard, these e-reading startups probably wouldn't be creating their own.