[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

First, that's not properly their decision to make. They promote themselves as selling books that you can read on multiple platforms, not being locked into the Kobo ecosystem. The lack of a download button directly contradicts that.

Out of a perhaps morbid curiosity, who do you feel should be making the decisions at Kobo? Hold a poll? To me, it's their company and their decisions to make. Whether I agree with even a majority of those decisions? Now that is my choice to make.

As for the content, say you download the Catto Creations I Love to Doodle ebook as an epub -- I downloaded it for a great-niece from iBooks and then downloaded it from Catto's web page to play with. You open it on your ereader and it looks like crap. Do you complain to Catto Creations? Or do you complain to Kobo? Given their customer "service" record, you want to increase that workload?

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

Second, even if you accept that they should make that decision, then they need to make it very clear that when buying the affected books, you must use their apps/readers to access them. They do not currently do so.

You can open a non-DRMed Kobo ebook with an epub2 ebook reader though locating it and renaming it is a bit of fun. Not to mention that the ebook may not display quite as intended if it uses epub3 features.

I would prefer if they gave more information on their site when purchasing a book about the ebook format, DRM, etc. but not that big a deal for me.

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

Third, their help pages make no mention of the fact that some books are locked into the Kobo ecosystem. They just say to click the blue button and download it. There's no hint of the possibility that such a button may not exist.

Unlike most other ereaders, Kobo does have a renderer capable of handling epub3 publications. To use that renderer requires the ebook be renamed as .kepub.epub. Most of the other modifications that need to be done such as the cover image metadata change is already part of a compliant epub3 ebook -- I don't count adding a few thousand spans as a needed modification. So Kobo can sell you an epub3 ebook and have it display more or less properly in the ACCESS renderer. Now you download the .epub version and it becomes a crapshoot as to how it looks on your ereader. Not so fine and good. Time to contact customer service and demand a refund because the ebook looked like crap.

Regards,
David