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Originally Posted by Turtle91
It appears that blufire as a company disagrees (as do I). I suppose we will see as time goes by.
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I kind of agree - with both of you. But if we do a good enough job on desktop apps, (plan to) ADE won't be *as* important.
And in the mean time, we have customers that are very specifically focused on distributing to mobile.
ADE supports a subset of the EPUB3 spec now, and most EPUB3 files should (somewhat) gracefully degrade in terms of the unsupported features (e.g. text an images are fine, but video won't display).
That said, there will be major challenges for the transition to EPUB3 - for consumers, retailers, and publishers alike. Ah, the joy of progress.
But for sure, EPUB3 is not our sole focus, as there are a lot of other important things to do at the same time, and EPUB3 adoption by publishers will take a while, both on the back-end and related to uneven client app support. That and Amazon may well never support it fully, even with Kindlegen transformation.
People make hay about he spec being done for a year. How many years did it take for browsers to have great, and consistent HTML/CSS support across vendors? Some would argue they are not even there yet.
What is currently driving EPUB3 is mostly fixed layout format, and that's because Apple won't accept PDF's for iBooks (for things like children's illustrated books). And while pubs would prefer to distribute one format, they'll need to distribute PDF as well to some channels for some time to come. Luckily, generated multiple different "fixed" formats is a lot easier than making great reflowable content.
-Micah