Personally, if I get an error message indicating that an ePub files contains encoding that is not UTF-8 or UTF-16 (I've seen 2 ePubs in my entire involvement with ereading that were UTF-16 encoded), that ePub is
not standards compliant and should be fixed. As section 3.9 of the ePub 3.3 recommendation states:
Quote:
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MUST be encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-16 [unicode], with UTF-8 as the RECOMMENDED encoding.
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While the ePub 2.0.1 Open Publication Structure document 1.4.1.2 states:
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A conformant XHTML Content Document must meet these conditions:
it is a well-formed XML document (as defined by XML 1.0); and
it is encoded in UTF-8 or UTF-16; and
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I will admit that I have seen several ePubs where the creator did not use UTF-8 or UTF-16 but again, they are not standards compliant and were often the result of an amateur converting book formats or converting an OCR scan of a pbook to an ePub document.