SVG, comics and E-books

E-books are on the rise. The list of devices is increasing quickly and then the number of formats for e-books. On Wikipedia site as of today, there are already 18 different formats and none which seems to be supported on all platforms. The ePub format is based on XHTML 1.1. Leading the pack of formats, there are

1. txt
2. pdf
3. html (some with supports of css)

Reading a summary about SVG Open 2008, I have stumbled upon this paragraph:

One of the first points is regarding SVG and comics. John Bintz had asked me to see if there was any interest. Before the first day was out, at least three different people had come up to me and mentioned them in one way or another, with at least one person telling how such an interest is what drew them into SVG to begin with. So I would take that as a big "yes".

I remembered then a tutorial for SVG comics by Doug Scheppers, now staff contact of SVG WG. Comics Sketch is a community Web site around comics. All the comics are done in SVG. In japan, mobile phones enable the reading of mangas. Unfortunately most of them do not use SVG, but a proprietary format (done by celsys) created by a specific authoring tool in this domain.

SVG alone or the combination of SVG with XHTML for e-books would be a very cool domain of application. There are enough open source renderer now that could be included on small devices. We can create amazing things with SVG such as map, anime characters. Do you know about SVG cartoons development environments?