[pssquirrel]

Originally Posted by BrodieKobo

Thanks for posting this issue and for PeterT to reach out to me to raise this to my attention. It looks like we're having issues with the download option off our site and I've raised this with our R&D team to investigate root cause.

Hi BrodieKobo,

Thanks for dropping in. So nice to have a Kobo rep taking a direct interest.

Is Kobo at all considering offering direct downloads of EPUB3?

I don't know what Kobo's grand plan is, but the impression I'm getting is that Kobo is moving from epub to kepub, and customers will eventually need to buy a Kobo reader or use the Kobo app to read books purchased from Kobo.

The impression I'm getting is that the only reason the "download options" info was added to the product pages is because the Sony orphans you accepted were getting frustrated when we started purchasing Kobo ebooks and found some of our newly bought ebooks could not be read on our Sony Readers because they were kepub-only. Refunds were promptly issued, and we were told to look for the Blackberry(?!) icon before buying a book because apparently the eReader icon only represents Kobo readers and not any other type of ereader. Since then "download options" have been added to the product pages. Thank you for this. Looking for "download option: EPUB" is much clearer than looking for the Blackberry icon.

In case you're wondering, I've downloaded EPUB3 from other sources, and I can read them on my Sony T2. I know that some EPUB3 features (multi-media?) are not supported by my Sony, but so far reading EPUB3 has not been a problem on my Sony and I suspect will not be since I read mostly straight text novels, which don't make use of advanced EPUB3 features.

So I'm wondering if Kobo is planning to continue supporting customers with non-Kobo readers -- which I would hope means adding support for downloading EPUB3 -- or if Kobo's goal is indeed to transition entirely to kepub.

Thanks!