Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
You really want Kobo to wait for Adobe to produce a rendering engine that will handle enough of EPUB3 to display non-European languages correctly? Given that Adobe has withdrawn their roadmap, it's gonna be a long wait.
You want Kobo to supply a rendering engine that will support Adobe ADEPT DRM? Again, it's gonna be a long wait.
As for the average consumer being confused? I seriously doubt the average consumer knows or cares that there are two different rendering engines much less is confused by them. Most of the people I know who have Kobo ereaders simply go to a website, select a book and download/sync them to their ereader. Ditto for the Sony, Kindle, Android tablet, etc. users.
Regards,
David
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I agree that most people don't know there are two different rendering engines (if we are getting picky, iOS actually has four; Adobe - using RMSDK, ePub reflowable, fixed layout epub, and, comic renderer), nor would they care, they just want to open and read a book.
iOS is interesting as due to the lack of an in-app store, people do click on the blue download buttons, which get the Adobe version of the files, and so do query why they need an Adobe ID, which for the most part they do not, unless it's a PDF file, as we don't download those in-app.
In addition, if you open a book in Adobe Renderer (only possible if you use the adobe version of the file), on iOS you can, quite literally, see the difference.
I'm not sure of all the changes we make in .kepub files. I know it's using our own encryption (where the book isn't free, or has to be DRM free, for example; books from Tor), and I know we do put in a specific css file that allows us to do certain things, the "Kobo Styling" option. This can be turned off and the book may render better, or possibly worse, some of the tweaks we put in are to make the files render better than they would otherwise.
I also agree that creating our own engine that supports ADEPT DRM would be a large task, and I'd say part of the reason we use Adobe's offering is that it is a lot less development effort than the former. However, implementing the Adobe SDK wasn't a five minute task, and you do need to pass the Adobe Certification process.