With e-Books becoming more and more popular, we ought to look at ways of converting them into other formats that may be seen a little more ‘Open’.

E-books are a disappointing flurry of vendor-specific formats. Get them converted to HTML to view on your choice of device.

Books in digital format, also known as e-books, can be read on devices lacking the power and screen space to afford a regular Web browser. Several publishers, not to mention projects such as Project Gutenberg, have provided thousands of new and classic titles in digital format. The problem is both the hardware-be it generic PDAs or dedicated devices-and the whole e-book publishing industry are much more fragmented than are PCs and Web browsers. Therefore, it is probable that the e-book you recently bought will not be readable ten years from now-nor tomorrow, should you decide to use a laptop or change PDAs. To help combat this fragmentation, this article discusses some existing command-line tools that can convert the most popular e-book formats to ASCII or HTML.

Practically no tools exist now to export e-book formats to PDF or OpenDocument, the new OASIS standard used in OpenOffice.org, but this is not necessarily a big deal. Once text is in ASCII or HTML format, it easily can be moved to plain-text or PDF format by using a text browser such as w3m or programs such as html2ps. If you go this route for conversion, you are able to do it today, and because it’s an open format, 20 years from now too. [Read the rest]