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As a digitally self-published poet struggling with formatting issues, who skipped EPUB because of its unpredictable layouts
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Define "formatting issue" and we can talk about them. As mentioned by other, the concept of reflowable eBook implies (sort-of) that the author/publisher/typographer is willing to surrender a certain degree of "power" to the reader.
Side story. Nearly one year ago, I did some consulting for a small but quite famous Italian publisher who lives in a narrow market (prose) niche. They insisted that the "look-and-feel" of their eBooks should be
exactly the same of their printed books. After a long, very detailed discussion of what can be done and what not, they kept insisting on it, to the point I suggested them to produce (relatively inexpensive) PDFs --- preferably in various formats: 5", 6" and 9" screens, A4 --- giving up all the "advantages" of reflowable ebooks. AFAIK, they are still making their minds up.
Anyway, w.r.t. to the "is EPUB 3 ready?" question. The DR is right on this: EPUB 3 support is scarce right now. By that, I mean "support for the new features introduced by EPUB 3"; otherwise, pretty much any EPUB 2 reading system is capable of reading what I call "an EPUB 2 ebook in an EPUB 3 container", that is, text + images + toc.ncx.
Even worse, even iBooks --- which is the only market-significant platform capable of render (some) EPUB 3 --- is not fully EPUB 3 compliant: for example, no MediaOverlay support for reflowable eBooks, MathML support is good for basic stuff but not for advanced stuff (surprised?), some rendition options are supported only through Apple-specific extensions (instead of standard declarations), etc.
On the other had, IMHO, the "is EPUB 3 dead on start?" question is more open to debate. There are two big issues here: 1) aside for the FXL craziness, EPUB 3 is mainly incremental w.r.t. EPUB 2 (the semantic vocabulary is ridiculously tiny and it is essentially ignored by reading systems, support for things like parallel texts is not even taken into consideration, not to mention the annotation stuff, etc.); 2) the "commercial dynamics" behind IDPF are clear: a bunch of non-Amazon (and non-Apple) publishers/vendors, who are more into marketing than into technology, with all the problems already mentioned above (everyone implements as much of EPUB 3 as it thinks good for its business, little investments, very little attention for "real eBook" features, etc.).