I'm looking forward to drop-caps, embedded fonts and true CSS support. Let's face it... Amazon was never going to pay Adobe to license their Adept DRM, so true epub support was always a pipe-dream in my opinion. There may have been some added benefit for personal documents by supporting drm-free epubs, but otherwise, epub support just didn't really make much business sense (regardless of how much I and others would have welcomed it).
So it seems Amazon decided to completely
leapfrog the current ePub specs and go directly to something that delivers what ePub3 has been promising. The difference being that Amazon devices will be delivering that type of content (ePub3-like) as early as this spring. That may actually put pressure on the IDPF to completely finalize the ePub 3 specs, because I'm guessing that the other eReader manufacturers are going to be scrambling to have ePub3 compliant devices/apps hitting the market around the same time that Amazon's K8 format hits select devices. Everyone benefits in my eyes. Except those that are obsessed with visions of "one format to rule them all."
