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Let's not neglect the "elephant in the room" when it comes to ePub, and that's DRM.
I think personally that, in permitting anyone to "bolt on" their own DRM method to an ePub file (and still call the result "ePub") the standards committee made a disastrous error.
At the moment we have ePub files with "Adobe Digital Editions" DRM. Shortly we'll also have ePub files with "eReader" DRM. In a year's time we could have other DRM methods as well. It's a recipe for disaster as far as the end user is concerned, with multiple, mutually-incompatible files all claiming (truthfully) to be "ePub" files.
One cannot just pretend that DRM doesn't exist, or that it's going to go away. It's with us, whether we like it or not, and it's going to be for the foreseeable future. I think personally that the ePub standard has messed up "big time" in this specific area, much as I support the overall concept of ePub as a standard in other areas.
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