Quote:
Originally Posted by John F
This seems like a rather weak excuse/reason by Kobo. B&N gets a epub(2) don't they? Doesn't Google Books get an EPub(2)? The libraries get an epub(2) don't they? (I just got The Burning Room from the library).
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I'm not buying the "publisher only supplies it in epub3" excuse (as the only reason) either. Even though I have occasionally received epub3 books from B&N, the fact that Google and others usually have the same book in epub2 format implies that the publisher is prepared to supply either epub2 or epub3. I believe that epub3 is only an ancillary effect of the real purpose for kepub-only Kobo books.
The publishers (and sometimes the authors) are under the impression that the device-specific DRM provided by kepub-only ebooks provides "more security" than the standard user-specific, ADEPT, side-loadable DRM scheme does. They've (publishers/authors) discovered that they can
force this "extra security" by only providing Kobo with an epub3 of their product.
Although with Amazon's Kindlegen/KDP process being perfectly capable of accepting epub3s as input and Kobo and B&N both being able accept epub3 submissions (iBooks has had ePub3 for a long time), I can foresee a point where no one's going to bother preparing two or three different submission formats for their ebooks. Unfortunately, it seems that rather than being used to "improve" the reader experience with its expanded feature set/functionality, ePub3 is mainly going to be used to lock readers into a vendor's proprietary ebook format/DRM-scheme that's been based upon it.