Quote:
Originally Posted by derangedhermit
Would you please explain the bold bit in more detail? And is this historical information, or how is it true today?
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At the time (ca 2008-2009) a lot of people were relying on Calibre to create epubs, even commercial ones. (Dunno if they still do but early BAEN epubs came that way.) And when they wouldn't display properly on this reader or that they would submit bug reports blaming Calibre. Eventually the word came down that unless a "bug" could be replicated in Adobe's reader it wouldn't be addressed; that as long as the epub displayed properly in ADE it woud be considered good.
That moved the support burden to the coders of non-ADE based apps and made ADE the de-facto standard implementation; if Adobe code rendered it well it was a good epub. If it didn't--even if it passed all validation suites and adhered to the spec--it wasn't.
Eventually things settled down so that it is relatively rare to run into epubs that are different enough they won't open or are radically different from what a pure Adobe product (from InDesign to ADE) looks like.
Not sure how much it matters today since the field has been weeded and most epub readers toe the Adobe spec. Generic ereader gadgets are almost all based on Adobe code. You might get "quirks" here and there but most epubs will at least open everywhere. (Except the proprietary variants from Apple, Nook, and Kobo that are only readable in *their* reading apps. But those are clearly identified as iBooks, Kepubs, Nook Kids, etc.)
Most ereader devices either license Adobe code or do without epub support.
(Kindle, obviously; but also the Jetbook Lite comes to mind.) Since it's a cost everybody incurs in the epub world it has little effect these days. But it does make adoption of non-Adobe DRM for epubs a bit less likely since most device builders would rather go with the devil they know. Path of least resistance...
Whether this will repeat with epub3 will have to wait on a full epub3 implementation from Adobe. Assuming epub3 ever gets that far.