Quote:
Originally Posted by Kayadelenium
So my answer is both: keep the old format for the devices that need it, and offer the modern one for the devices that can use it, and let each reader pick the file that fits their device. A publisher could do the same with a book.
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Publishers won't support multiple formats of the same book beyond what is commercially viable. Support EPUB and AZW3 - fine, makes commercial sense. Support two different EPUB formats - no way; it's added expense, added complexity in production, and a customer support nightmare when you get complaints from a person that bought a book they can't read on their old device/software because they couldn't tell them apart, for practically no gain at all.
They also won't switch their tooling to something that supports that - they hardly support making native ebooks beyond exporting a print book from InDesign (which doesn't support WEBP), so they absolutely won't do a thing to adopt new formats when the support is fledgling and the old ones are good enough for 99.999% of the clientele.
This does feel a bit like trying to reinvent the wheel when the support still isn't wide enough to bother with, for a solution to a largely non-existant problem. Yeah, it would be nice to have lossless images instead of JPG or PNG that don't take up more space than the text content 10 times over, but the publishers largely couldn't care less, nor most users (besides, AVIF is even better than WEBP - though support is even worse).
Still, an interesting personal project no doubt, but I wouldn't expect any widespread adoption (the overwhelming majority of ebooks hardly make any use out of EPUB3-specific features, and it's over a decade-old spec).