What format or formats should you release it in? The choices have narrowed somewhat in the last year or two, but there’s still nothing approaching a “standard”. Here’s the lowdown on the current contenders.
Text (.txt)
Ah, the simple, universal and minimalist appeal of good old ASCII. This is the format to use if you want the widest possible distribution and acceptance. Anyone can read ASCII. Unix, Windows, Mac, Palm, Pocket PC, Rocket… Heck, even an old Commodore 64 can read ASCII. Project Gutenberg, a volunteer project to preserve the great public domain works of literature in digital form, uses ASCII because of it’s universal, cross platform nature. The downside, of course, is that you have to forgo fancy formatting like italics and aside from possibly distributing the book in a password-protected .zip file, you have no security. I’m not big on copy protection DRM, but I do think that the idea of ebooks at least being read-only has some appeal, so others can’t alter your work.