First of all, welcome to the party, Catherine! Best of luck with your free downloads program!
I just tested the download on my laptop. Firefox correctly downloads it as .epub. But IE wants to download it as .zip--so, yeah, it's something IE is doing. I don't what causes it, but there must be something in the file, or in the way it's posted. Just to test, I went to my own free downloads with IE and clicked on an epub file, and it did
not try to change it to zip.
So, Catherine, I think you have a glitch. But it'll take someone smarter than me to tell you how to fix it.