Quote:
Originally Posted by stewacide
Given that Epub including Epub3 is just a subset of the web standards every modern browser supports, shouldn't it be absolutely trivial for Amazon/BN/Kobo/Sony to simply port Webkit or Mozilla to their devices, with some tweaks, as the rendering engine, a la Apple's solution with iBooks? Writing an Ebook engine from the ground up seems like re-inventing the wheel.
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Not trivial.
There is simply too much room for interpretation of the specs that results in *visibly* discordant formatting in different engines/apps. That is why they talk of having to do different versions for all four of the retailers (and probably a fifth for generic Adobe clients if you expand their analysis outside NorthAm).
More, some of the epub features in epub3 (the primary subject of the forking explosion) are *very* CPU/GPU/DRAM intensive. There is stuff in epub3 that*Apple* is ignoring in their ibook fork that would eat alive current top-of-the-line iPads.