Comment It needs to be more computer-friendly (Score 2) 256
It definately does need to have markup codes, though. I'd personally prefer XML, because it would allow the documents to include book-relevant tags like <chapter number> and such, which would make the e-texts a great deal more machine-readable, and accessible for everyone. (in addition, it would make it a lot easier to re-publish the texts.)
I design and typeset books for a living, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that it's a lot easier to remove or process existing codes than it is to insert them. A machine can easily reformat a marked-up document; if plain text is wanted, a one-line perl script can be written to remove everything within angle brackets. The reverse is not the case. Computers are not currently smart enough to know where to add tags, so right now, every single tag in a document has to be inserted by a person.
All too often, that person is me.