With all due respect to you sorcerers and wizards (seriously), I believe that the technical discussion of what eBooks can or cannot do, and the extent to which they should or should not behave like browsers in terms of supporting the latest in CSS/HTML standards neglects the other side of the equation – and one I feel much more comfortable with – and that’s the point of view of the eBook’s consumer.
Not to bore people unnecessarily with war stories, but I’m basically a consumer who became frustrated because he couldn’t find an eBook he was interested in and decided to do it himself. The main problem I encountered is that while the current state of eBooks is good enough for text documents (say, War and Peace) it doesn’t work as well for media-heavy books. To clarify, take a look at
this Web page about the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no.1. It contains, besides text, images (snippets of the score) and audio clips (snippets from the movement). I wanted to create an eBook which would be able to replicate that and more. It doesn’t have to “look like the web page”, but it does have to be able to, in addition to viewing the images and listening to the audio, give the reader the ability, if he so chooses, to view additional information either briefly (as in a tooltip), or more permanently (in the form of a popup box which can be later closed). And this additional information itself may contain, in addition to text (in more than one language), images and audio/video clips. All this in a self-contained book which may be read on a train or plane, with no internet connection.
As far as I know, Kindle doesn’t support this wish list; neither does EPUB2. So I tried to create numerous mini-versions of this kind of eBook in EPUB3 format with Sigil. I tested the Sigil output on Windows with the most recent versions of Calibre, Adobe Digital Editions and Epub-Catalog, a Firefox add-on (I wasn’t aware of Readium which Doitsu recommends – I’ll try it next); in most cases, if it didn’t work on Sigil, it didn’t work on the others. On Android, I tried it on Gitden (mostly useless), Overdrive for Libraries (worked occasionally) and Infinity Reader (the best so far). (I don’t use Apple, so I don’t know how well these eBooks do in that environment).
At the end of the day, as long as the eBook does exactly what I (the reader) want it do, I personally don’t care if all readers on all operating systems can read it. If it can be read in one application on Windows and on one garden variety 8”-10” Android device (or, using add-ons, in the most recent versions of Firefox and Chrome), the rest (Apple devices, Kindle devices, legacy browsers) doesn’t matter. I understand that a real commercial publisher has difference concerns, but I wasn’t trying to solve all problems at once. And it's just frustrating to me that something which I thought was simple (erroneously, it seems) would turn out to be so difficult...