Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe
50 points by cohix
50 points by cohix
Personally I'm mad at Kobo for being cowards and not using their own renderer for all epubs. Having to kepubify every side-loaded ebook is a pain in the butt.
In a perfect world, RMSDK would just stop living in the CSS stone-ages
Adobe sets standards, even if they are crap ones. From where Adobe are sitting, no-one else matters.
I've still never been able to trust a company that had two completely incompatible standards for forms created in their own software. LiveCycle forms couldn't be edited in Acrobat Pro at all.
Not sure when the update was posted, but the way to make a Kobo use their render that actually does a good job with EPubs is to rename the file so it has a .kepub.epub file extension - that's it.
I discovered this building my ebook toolchain and was pretty darn surprised:
I'm curious about this. I have a ten year-old kobo ereader, and so far it's been able to read every epub I've thrown at it without problem. I've never had to change any extension.
I'm quite happy with mine, but considering the terrible experiences other people seem to have with them, I'm left wondering if mine was a fluke.
Most commercial ebooks are deliberately very conservative, just so it doesn't break in Adobe's renderer. It's just like IE back in the day - as a user, it was fine, but as someone making a site, you hated its guts.
I've actually rolled epubs myself, but I just assumed I had to be extremely conservative in using HTML features.
HTML should never have been chosen as the document format for ebooks. It's the worst possible choice for devices that are limited in processing power and display capabilities. But now that we're stuck with it, it just seems sensible to stick to the most minimal subset of it.
It's the worst possible choice for devices that are limited in processing power and display capabilities.
That line of reasoning doesn't hold up for me. Much of HTML was developed on a 25 MHz 68030 with a monochrome display. These eBook readers certainly eclipse that.
Most ebook readers sold today have a refresh rate significantly worse than that 25Mhz 68030. And if the Epub specification had limited itself to HTML 2.0, or 3.2, the versions actually developed on that 68030, things would've probably been manageable.
But instead the Epub specification explicitly includes the gargantuan most recent versions not just HTML, but also CSS and Javascript as table stakes, seemingly indifferent to the real world in which these devices are made to a price that does not allow for the hardware to support these standards in full, let alone perpetual software updates to keep up with the moving targets.
A real world in which the main platform of these standards is a multi-decade disaster of compatibility problems and developers unable to support or test all platforms, despite browser development being funded by some of some of the richest companies in the world.
Most ebook readers sold today have a refresh rate significantly worse than that 25Mhz 68030.
Shouldn't that make those readers require less processing power?
But instead the Epub specification explicitly includes the gargantuan most recent versions not just HTML, but also CSS and Javascript as table stakes
Ew. I didn't think they pulled in javascript in practice.
I also wouldn't have called HTML and CSS "gargantuan"... I've certainly comfortably rendered the level of HTML and CSS that ebooks should be using on a low-end PPC 601. (I think it'd render comfortably on an '030 but I no longer have one of those in my zoo to test.)
A real world in which the main platform of these standards is a multi-decade disaster of compatibility problems and developers unable to support or test all platforms, despite browser development being funded by some of some of the richest companies in the world.
That's a good point. I was thinking they were frozen at XHTML and CSS 3, which is much easier.
Exactly. The default does work but supports an extremely limited subset of epub. Fine for eg Moby Dick but not for a more modern programming book.
As someone who has dabbled in making epubs, I wouldn't say it's "extremely limited". Annoying at times, yes, because you end up having to do workarounds to get things like you want, but I haven't run into things being impossible.
I remember when Kobo ditched their Web reader, suddenly making my Kobo library unusable on most of my devices. Their response? Basically to shrug and suggest I buy one of their e-readers.
Never again.
any e-reader you prefer using now, or do you prefer reading ebooks on your laptop/workstation?
I just use Emacs on my laptop or desktop. I've been buying more print books too, especially at second hand bookstores.