any discussion of "what .epub supports" is dishonest dialog.

because the truth is that different .epub viewer-programs
"support" different subsets of the "official standard", and
thus the _reality_ of the format is that it's one huge mess,
a "standard" that's been embraced and extended to death,
whenever it wasn't locked-down with d.r.m. to begin with.

and that is exactly how the corporate publishers _want_ it.

because they're trying to stave off the revolution that will
short-circuit their cash-registers and ruin their business.

so what are they doing with .epub? why, coming out with
_a_3.0_version_, of course, the better to boggle you with.
you think things were confusing and fragmented _before_?
well let's throw audio and video into the mix too, because
the last decade of the web _proved_ they cause infighting.
throw in some javascript, and html5, maybe flash as well,
in order to _ensure_ that e-books are a nasty experience.

I'm not sure. As content creators, it's in publishers' best interest to ensure wide support of some sort of standard. We can draw an analogy that it's in the best interest of nytimes.com that all browsers support a big enough set of HTML5 so they don't have to create so many versions of their homepage.

Also, to be fair, if they publishers want to add enhanced content into epub, doesn't that mean that they do want to move the industry forward? In fact, so far it seems that they don't even want to wait for epub3 and have started investing into native apps that go beyond want epub can do (here is an example of a collaboration of Faber & Faber and TouchPress - http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-waste-land/id427434046?mt=8).

it's no accident that amazon outpaced i.d.p.f. even while
using a format that was supposedly "inferior" to .epub...

but the end-run is inevitable, so all i.d.p.f. can do is stall it.

study the "history" all you want, most especially if you want
to distract people from _the_future_. but if you want to go
_forward_, we need _a_clean_break_ from crap like .epub...

-bowerbird

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