Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The problem as I see it is that sure, you are using the ePub 3.2 spec, but most software for reading ePub barely handles ePub 3.0 let alone ePub 3.2. So because of this, you are doing a lot of work that a lot of people won't be able to read because it won't work or it won't look good.
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epub 3.2 is backwards-compatible with epub 3.0.1. Reading systems that can do one can generally do the other. I agree that adoption of epub 3.0 was slow, but the epub 3.0 spec was released in 2011, and the world has had 9 years to build compatible ereaders. Today I consider adoption of the 3.0 spec to be at an acceptable level, and we must dig our heels in and move forward instead of forever catering to the past. After all, if we were
really serious about backwards compatibility, we should do what Project Gutenberg does and simply release plain text ebooks and forget epub all together. After all, are we
really compatible if an ebook can't be read on an MS-DOS terminal from 1985?
Fortunately, all of the ebooks we produce at Standard Ebooks are structured consistently, because part of the point of the project is to create ebooks that are easy to machine process. If you wanted to read one of our books on your epub 2.x reader, you could write a script to do the conversion, and the script would in theory work across our entire corpus.