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kepub: why does it exist?
i suppose i don't have a "real" reason for asking this question, other than to satisfy my curiosity. but i know that people generally seem to prefer reading kepubs on a Kobo, over the standard epub. i know that Kobo's reader parses or renders kepubs differently than it does epubs. kepub enables features like inline or popup footnotes/annotations, chapter length estimations, and so on. so my question is this:
what's the technical reason for this? is it that Kobo handles epubs poorly or incorrectly? that is to say, do other devices support such additional features on a bog-standard epub, where Kobo has made a decision not to, in favor of their own extension to the format?
i'm just sort of wondering what's the point of the kepub in the first place. is it an anachronistic relic, left over from a time when the epub format specification was deemd lacking, and Kobo created an enhancement that they just haven't gotten around to abandoning?
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