[danudey]

IIRC gzip can't handle this, but bzip2 can; a guy I know wrote an offline Wikipedia app for the original iPhone and had to crunch things down a lot, and he used bzip2 because you can skip ahead to a chunk without having to process the previous or subsequent chunks.

Then he just had to write some code to index article names based on which chunk(s) they were in, and boom, random-access compressed archive.