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Kobo is in a bit of a nasty position on this. The company remains committed to allowing their books to be read on any compatible device. The problem is the issue of compatibility.
I believe the problem is publishers submitting their epub files as epub3 when they don't have to be.
Adobe's RMSDK doesn't support epub3 fully. It's a major reason that Kobo went with ACCESS for kepub, as they need epub3 to support international markets, particularly Asian ones.
So, what to do when a publisher submits a book as epub3? Well, in an ideal world, Kobo would examine the epub, determine it's compatible with RMSDK despite being typed as epub3 and set up the download links for the acsm files.
The problem there is, naturally, time & money. Kobo may have backing from Rakuten, but they are not a large company. They're not Amazon, which can get by on razon-thin profit margins as long as they continue to gain market share. They don't have the resources to be examining tons of books all the time.
They could just put out the link anyways. One of our fellow posters (regrettably, I can't recall the screen-name) has made the point that almost nobody uses the epub3 features that would cause problems. However, I can understand the company's reluctance to make available a product that they're not convinced will work properly.
So I think they've made a reasonable choice under the circumstances. If it's submitted as epub3, don't enable an Adobe DRM download until the publisher resubmits as epub2.
Still frustrating for those folks that sideload everything. Kobo really should bring back the file type info.
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