Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
I believe my government does (we have pretty good consumer protection, on paper at least). Companies are required to disclose material information about purchases before the sale. Since Kobo does advertise epub downloads, and that their ebooks work on other ADE-compatible devices, there is a problem.
[URL="http://www.kobobooks.com/ade"]"Digital Editions can read all of the book formats offered in the Kobo Store. [...]
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Advertising epub downloads does not mean that every ebook is going to be available in an epub2 format.
As for ADE, that may have been true a few years back but the times have changed. The current version of ADE was designed for epub2 compliant (more or less...) ebooks. It does not handle the changes between the epub2 and epub3 standards very well. Nor does it deal with several of the formats that are shown as tablet/iOS/Android only on the Kobo site.
You might want to take a look at the number of complaints that B&N has received about their PagePerfect NOOK books from people who purchased ebooks that did not say PagePerfect in the title/information/whatever and then realized they looked like crap. Not much information about PagePerfect but from the two examples I've seen, it looks suspiciously like an epub3 fixed layout document.
As another example, the local library has an ntroduction to Asian cooking ebook. When I downloaded it with ADE (download link says DRM epub) and looked at it in ADE, the text and image layout stank, titles were showing up in the middle of pages, there was no table of contents, etc. Open the epub file with 7Zip and checking the contents showed that it was an epub3 file. I tried reading it in an epub3 renderer and it actually looked quite good -- even had an table of contents and popup notes.
As a freebie from the library, this didn't bother me. If I had purchased the book from Kobo, downloaded it and found this out, I would have requesting a refund.
Regards,
David