Your ePub Is fine

https://andreklein.net/your-epub-is-fine-kobo-disagrees-blame-adobe/

by sohkamyung • 1 month ago

919 284 1 month ago

anenefan3• 1 month ago

The TLDR version is Abode supports backward compatibility ... and epub - * International Digital Publishing Forum* - is playing with a sprawling mess opting for the race to the top newest standards ... that always works so well and ensures the user base is always upgrading.

I'm very grateful for this information and it explains why I've avoided epub opting for pdf over epub as my reader software is old.

I'm am very much on the side of supporting backwards compatibility. It reminds me of the times the M$ used to upgrade their doc standards ... where if one hadn't upgraded, well bad luck.

simcop2387• 1 month ago

I think its one reason ive been happy with software based epub readers where upgrading is usually reasonable to do. Either on my phone or android based eink reader. That said if they change too much then yea nobody will produce the new standard and only support the old one if it isnt carefully designed for graceful degredation.

MrLeap• 1 month ago

An epub is just a plain html webpage compressed into a zip and its extension changed from .zip to ".epub". Assuming you have a web browser, you have something that will almost certainly render your epubs contents.

PDF is not nearly as pleasant under the hood. It's down right lovecraftian.

ablob• 1 month ago

The lovecraftian horror of pdf mostly comes into play through the sheer amount of software that supply almost correct pdf. It's not enough to be able to read pdf anymore, you also have to be able to deal with software that emits subtly wrong documents.

goodmythical• 1 month ago

I was floored to discover this recently when I clicked "edit" in calibre for the first time a few weeks ago.

Straight HTML, edit anything everywhere. Super slick.

anenefan3• 1 month ago

I'm aware thanks. Mostly it's just my preferred viewer is older than css4 but it's been nice to find out why that was the case.

PDFs can be painful as well, more often it's then using abode's pdf viewer, but it's far less common for me. There was a time many years ago when I understood PDF structures better, back when I chose to manually edit and fix a couple of malformed PDFs.

gsnedders5• 1 month ago

To be clear, ADE’s behaviour is not conforming to any version of the standards it claims to implement. If it had been, it would reject that specific max-width property declaration as having an invalid value and ignore it, not reject the entire document: every single version of CSS has required that forwards-compatible behaviour.

PDF is not somehow immune to this either — a non-conforming implementation could similarly break what are meant to be forward-compatible extension points by raising an error on an unknown stream or object instead of (as required by the standard) ignoring it.

anenefan3• 1 month ago

So if I understand correctly a struggling epub viewer or ADE should skip css that it considers malformed - which means the reason my viewers have considered a epub to be not able to be viewed / corrupt / whatever it is for some other reason than more recent / current css implementation.

PDFs certainly can suck, more often those that will only work with abode's software and other viewers I've tried can not.

L-four• 1 month ago

It's always CSS.

m4634• 1 month ago

compatible style stuff

charcircuit• 1 month ago

but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!

The epub standard doesn't say what version of CSS must be supported. There were no guarantees modern CSS would work so I wouldn't call the renderer broken.

ninth_ant• 1 month ago

If the renderer completely fails because of a minor issue when parsing the css, that is broken.

nightpool• 1 month ago

No, the CSS spec is specifically designed to be forwards compatible because of exactly this issue. Any invalid CSS rule should only cause that specific line to be ignored, not the whole stylesheet. And certainly even if your CSS parser chokes in some specific case, it shouldn't cause your ereader to fail to load the entire book!

gsnedders5• 1 month ago

You are of course correct that ePub nowadays doesn’t mandate a given version of CSS (though earlier versions did!), but that doesn’t matter in this case: it’s non-conforming according to even CSS level 1 (1996), per https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217#forward-compatible-par...

illegal values, or values with illegal parts, are treated as if the declaration weren't there at all

So a conforming implementation would ignore that max-width property declaration, not raise an error.

And those earlier versions of ePub which defined a required subset of given CSS standards? The forwards-compatible parsing rules were part of their subset.

acdha3• 1 month ago

The parser is broken. The CSS standard says that parsers MUST ignore properties they don't recognize.

Ardren• 1 month ago

ePub3 is CSS2.1 (+ some extras) CSS21 standard says "Illegal values. User agents must ignore a declaration with an illegal value."

Ignore != Fatal error

tech234a• 1 month ago

Adobe Digital Editions and RMSDK were recently sold to Wipro Engineering: https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/eol-faq-adobe-digital-...

thisislife23• 1 month ago

Sold or outsourced?

Finnucane3• 1 month ago

'transitioned'

wut42• 1 month ago

Wipro now manages and distributes any new updates, enhancements, bug fixes, and support requests directly
Create your new ByteBooks ID using the same email address that you used for Adobe ID

Seems sold mostly.

jwrallie• 1 month ago

When I started out, I dreaded the moment when I hit the validate button on my finished book after months of work, because it would always find something to cry about.

I remembered one particular master student on the verge of tears trying to compile his LaTeX thesis draft, he took the “write and think about formatting later” too literally and was trying to compile it for the first time very close to the deadline.

gnatolf• 1 month ago

Which, to be fair, overall probably still saved quite some time. The compile times alone would've meant they wasted so much more time by repeated earlier checks.

Whether a looming deadline changed the perception about that, we don't know ;-P

samtheDamned• 1 month ago

This is similar to my experience doing a research project for a fellowship. I had a barebones LaTeX file but I pushed doing the proper formatting for when I was finished writing and then had a hell of a time trying to get it all working properly right before the submission date haha.

tannhaeuser• 1 month ago

Unfortunately, epub and epubcheck isn't the great uncontroversial resource the author makes it out to be. When W3C, Inc. took over maintenance of the EPub spec around when 3.1 was current, they just referenced WHATWG HTML and other ever-expanding browser specs ([1]). Being "living standards", these have no versioning or QA. As a consequence of being based on a version of HTML that redefined headers and sectioning, Epub 3.2 just made existing epubs non-conforming. Which is why Calibre and other tool still recommend 3.1 or better yet 2.

The case mentioned where the CSS min() function is rejected is another place where bulk import of the extremely complex CSS spec is just not helpful. Ebook readers aren't evergreen browsers after all.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41326179

ramblurr2• 1 month ago

Yes, it is widely known in the epub space that targeting 3.1 or 2 is the more sane option.

With EPUB compatibility issues CSS should always be suspect number 1. Using "modern" CSS features and complaining about missing flex boxz grid, etc is a web developer's mindset.

Just because EPUB shares some of the stack with the web doesn't mean they perfectly overlap (or even should).

Hardly any e-ink embedded e-reader devices use a browser for rendering, they all use purpose built HTML/CSS parsing and rendering toolchains, are baked into firmware and updated once in a blue moon. (If you're interested look at koreader's crengine or Crosspoint reader which runs on an ESP32!)

The blog post reeks of overly confident AI prose. But don't be fooled.

lavela• 1 month ago

Shouldn't a CSS engine just ignore directives it doesn't know? At least it shouldn't fail without an error.

port112• 1 month ago

Are we blaming the spec and the author of the post for trying to conform to the checks, instead of blaming Adobe or Kobo for using 16-year old technology that ISN’T spec-compliant? -.-

lidavidm• 1 month ago

AIUI, Kobo devices have a more advanced rendering engine if you name the file with .kepub.epub. (I think it's based on ePub 3?) Not sure if it would fix the problem here. But I personally run ePubs through kepubify (https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/try/) before transferring them to my Kobo.

louisbourgault• 1 month ago

Yes, I do that for everything too. Also publishers like Standard ebooks provide a kepub download - as they explain here they have problems with the Adobe reader too. https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...

I love my Kobo (clara colour) and really, if they just removed the Adobe reader, it'd be perfect. And yes, I've tried KOreader, but never switched to it because I like my Overdrive library books and Kobo Store.

buu709• 1 month ago

I love my Kobo (clara colour) and really, if they just removed the Adobe reader, it'd be perfect. And yes, I've tried KOreader, but never switched to it because I like my Overdrive library books and Kobo Store.

You may have already tried this, but they all work fine together. You can just exit the KOReader app and use the default Kobo stuff, then open KOReader again when you want to read something via that.

FinnKuhn• 1 month ago

Looks like this info was added to the post as an update.

acdha3• 1 month ago

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner.

I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. — and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out.

echelon• 1 month ago

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium.

JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse.

I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and Adobe for being such awful stewards of one of the most amazing web technologies.

Kids growing up today have no idea how magical Flash was. It was like Roblox or Minecraft for web.

Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease.

LeFantome• 1 month ago

You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right?

https://ruffle.rs

But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.

m104• 1 month ago

Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition.

In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.

drtz• 1 month ago

Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power.

Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?

turpentine• 1 month ago

Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support.

Papazsazsa• 1 month ago

You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs.

fragmede2• 1 month ago

Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but pretend you're 16 right now.

I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie.

What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol

LooseMarmoset• 1 month ago

this is unfortunately, the most revisionist take I can imagine. I don’t mean this in a personal way, mind you but while it may have been magical to publish interactive websites, using flash, that magic is utterly outweighed by the mundane vulnerabilities that flash was riddled with.

It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all.

I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation.

m4634• 1 month ago

I would think:

1) macromedia ->

2) adobe ->

3) steve jobs

I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.

spankibalt• 1 month ago

"Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease."

Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).

thisislife23• 1 month ago

Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.

kalleboo2• 1 month ago

What I never understand is why we never got a Flash-level authoring tool that exported to modern JavaScript/Canvas. Ruffle shows it can be done.

Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.

fnord77• 1 month ago

heisenbugs

gold

dredmorbius3• 1 month ago

A well-established term of art dating to 1983:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug>.

JadeNB• 1 month ago

Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html

2cynykyl• 1 month ago

I also learned this term pretty recently, loved it. Another fav tech term is automagically :-)

dddw• 1 month ago

Fnord gold

pmarreck• 1 month ago

Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;)

Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only.

/dates me

m348e912• 1 month ago

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

tjoff• 1 month ago

The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.

And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...

pell• 1 month ago

Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.

pjmlp• 1 month ago

And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling.

Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.

tracker14• 1 month ago

I worked in eLearning in the early-mid 00's and Flash/Flex were king at the time... Came to find so many flaws that were used, and kept me from using Flash at home.

A bit earlier... when Adobe had taken over Macromedia, my hopes were really that Flash would become something like a .zip file with assets as SVG, audio, etc. and ActionScript/JavaScript as the glue... I think it could still be a good package format for browsers. Given Adobe's work prior to that on advancing/enhancing SVG support for browsers etc. Making Flash just the best of breed tool for creators.

That's not what happened though. Adobe is just a massive rental scheme at this point, and I think the time may be up sooner than later... I honestly think at this point, the first well-placed competing product with solid Linux support will unseat them. I know a lot of people are using Davinci Resolve and Photopea, and if those work well enough for you, that's great. Not sure the effort it would take to get some of the open alternatives into a better position overall.

TeaVMFan• 1 month ago

When building EPublish ( https://frequal.com/epublish/ ), an HTML-to-epub converter, I faced similar hurdles. Trying to keep compatibility with numerous e-readers built with different stacks and varying degrees of EPUB versions is frustrating.

I used EPublish for my first novel, Means and Motive, just published here, DRM-free: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYCZJVGX

So far I haven't heard of compatibility issues, so I think EPublish has hit the sweet spot of EPUB targeting. I agree, however, that it feels like the old days of targeting IE6 on the web. Old readers still exist out there, so we have to aim for the lowest common denominator.

badsectoracula• 1 month ago

Be happy your readers use an ePub reader that supports (or at least, ignores) something like `max-width` in the first place :-P.

TBH i've being using an ePub reader that i occasionally had to edit ePub files so i get rid of the superfluous styling that made it either not work or show things weirdly/wrong and i've heard comments from others that a bunch of files i had no issues with personally were unreadable for them, which makes me think that unless you really and absolutely need any fancy formatting (i.e. math stuff that can't just be made images - and you really tried to!) then you should stick with the most basic HTML imaginable - things that not even IE4 would render (too) wrong.

And in turn, since i doubt this will ever happen, i sometimes ponder making an "epub reconstruct" tool that attempts to reconstruct epubs so that they use the simplest HTML/CSS :-P (ideally configurable for maximum compatibility).

thatguy00• 1 month ago

Ah, yes. When I paint, I also leave the middle unpainted, in case some people have a crack in their glasses that would make the painting look weird. Or maybe we should tell glasses makers to make better glasses and let the artists make their art.

teddyh• 1 month ago

People making shows for TV had to respect the TV ”safe area”: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Safe_area_(televi...>

dlcarrier• 1 month ago

It's already bad enough that HTML/CSS barely works in the target web browser environment, I don't see why anyone decided it was a good idea to use it for books.

I've often thought about figuring out a subset that operates fast on any computer and sticking to that for any web pages I make. If someone figured that out for epub, it would make it much, much more useful.

WolfeReader• 1 month ago

Every Kobo reader is capable of running KoReader ( http://koreader.rocks/ ). That's the first, and probably last, step I'd take to render a book that the default reader takes issue with.

criddell• 1 month ago

As I understand it, KoReader doesn’t work with drm protected books which means I can’t use it with most books I buy.

Ebook producers really should be forced to either drop drm or adopt a cross-platform standard.

downsplat• 1 month ago

Search around, there's surely a way to break the drm. When theres no better way that's what I do too: pay for the book, convert to plain epub.

The publishing industry never got its head out of... some dark place. We've been able to buy mp3s without drm for ages, but somehow books are different.

troyvit• 1 month ago

It's probably too annoying for most, but I had a similar problem with KoReader and library books because those too depend on DRM. I ended up keeping KoReader as an app, then just not loading the app when I was reading a library book. It wasn't too bad.

KoReader also gave me a lot of freedom to manage the bad battery life of my Kobo Sage before it died of other causes. Definitely worth the extra cognitive load of dealing with the two experiences.

Javalicious• 1 month ago

Wow. This brings up some (bad) memories of working with an .epub export about 10 years ago. We had some embedded fonts to work around some poor rendering in some of the readers we tested, but some of the readers ignored the fonts altogether, causing the content to render boxes (bangs head on table)

It looks like not a whole lot has changed in that space -- the readers are still the gate for what you can do with the format. Who's available to make a CanIUse for epub readers, to shame them into compliance? (only partly /s)

nfw23• 1 month ago

As someone who has spent a good deal of time trying to build ereader software, eventually I decided to try to deal with the devil and build on top of RMSDK.

There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well.

There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not even so much as a "Thanks for your interest" or a "We will get back to you".

I messaged a former colleague who worked there to try to see what the process is to get access to rmsdk. He said he tried to find internal docs about it and couldn't find anything.

I tried to find people on linkedin who might be associated with rmsdk and ask them and similarly found nothing.

Meanwhile publishers only distribute most of their titles with one of their known drm vendors ie Apple, Amazon, or Adobe. The other two are entirely closed off.

If this isn't anticompetitive trust behavior, I don't know what is.

stonecharioteer6• 1 month ago

Hello, I'm building https://merrilin.ai, could I pick your brain about the problems you faced?

nfw23• 1 month ago

Sure thing. I've actually been working on the spoiler-free resource angle as well. I can book a call to talk. Distribution is the killer problem here though.

pbronez2• 1 month ago

That’s really cool! I’ve been thinking about how LLMs could help me with long running series. I read lots of stuff that’s thousands of pages long with a huge cast of characters and locations. Amazons X-Ray is okay ish but (1) not supported everywhere and (2) amazon.

It would be really fun to have a progress-aware AI that can give me a quick definition of entities like people and places. The other thing that would help is details about fictional mechanics. How exactly does FTL work in this universe? What were all the cultivation stages? I don’t need help with reading comprehension, I need a better way to flip back through everything and surface the key detail that was mentioned one time 500 pages ago.

Also, unfortunately my library lives in Kindle. Help me get it out, at least the DRM free stuff. I also use Royal Road extensively and pay for that. Would be great to have those live serials supported somehow.

Suppafly• 1 month ago

I used the FBReader app to read a ton, they make their SDK available for other apps to use.

nfw23• 1 month ago

The last time I looked into this, readium lcp drm wasn't something US publishers were comfortable distributing their titles with, although it seems like this may be changing, which is good insofar as readium is at least open source and free to build with.

naikrovek• 1 month ago

Death to Adobe. For this reason and 10,000 others.

danpalmer• 1 month ago

Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!

But isn't that kind of the point of epubcheck? It's surely not intended to validate all of CSS, it's intended to validate that an epub will work... and not working on Kobo devices (probably #2 manufacturer of ebook readers?) is a major issue.

gsnedders5• 1 month ago

epubcheck is meant to ensure conformance with the standards, not the interoperably implemented subset of the standards. (Which has lots of awkward questions: which implementations of the standards, which versions of those implementations, etc.)

ameliaquining4• 1 month ago

The latter seems like what the tool's users actually want. That it's a harder problem doesn't change that.

chocolatkey2• 1 month ago

Kobo is actually in the process of completely rewriting their e-reader software (you can download the beta in the EU), and I’m pretty sure it’s no longer based on RMSDK. Adobe basically handed the EPUB DRM market to LCP on a silver platter by being a poor maintainer and then selling off to a third party that had botched the migration and further angered end users and platforms, that are switching off Adobe faster than ever

el_benhameen• 1 month ago

Have you tried the beta? Have you found it to be substantially better?

chocolatkey2• 1 month ago

I’m not in the EU so I have not, this is based on the technical changes mentioned, and what I’ve heard from people. Feel free to try if you are in the EU: kobo.com/update

anilakar• 1 month ago

Only in EU because of the Accessibility Act[1]. Copywrong holders are allowed to disable screen readers elsewhere because that allows them to sell more audiobooks. You will apparently also lose many other features, among them Asian scripts and developer mode.

[1] https://www.kobo.com/kobo-writing-life/blog/our-commitment-t...

BoingBoomTschak• 1 month ago

Interesting news! Though I'm on https://koreader.rocks/ like most people here, I suppose.

dottchen• 1 month ago

BOOX works fine. One solution is to ask Codex to reformat your epub file before importing it to your ereader.

tcoff91• 1 month ago

I love my Boox, I run Storyteller on it instead of the native e-reader. I love that it’s just an android tablet with an e-ink screen.

yoavm4• 1 month ago

BOOX devices are great except for the GPL violation. It's really a shame.

boznz• 1 month ago

For my free novels which I deliberately keep the styles to header2 and body text, it is surprising the amount of crud that all the ePub conversion softwares generate, especially since they are just zipped web-pages.

These days I usually get 90% of the way on google docs, then do the final editing on LibreOffice which can add things like tables of contents and cover image, if it opens on Kindle, Kobo and Calibre I consider it job done.

GreenSalem• 1 month ago

"EPUB is an amazing open standard for ebooks, and yet so many implementations of it are just fundamentally flawed, all in the name of keeping IP lawyers happy."

Easy to be dismissive, but IP violations can cost a large company hundreds of millions.

IP lawyers are more important to many companies than their software developers.

If you doubt that, check to see who gets paid more...

unnouinceput• 1 month ago

I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that.

As such, whenever I get my hands on an .epub file, I go to an online converter, convert it to a .pdf file and nuke it from my system. Then the .pdf gets opened in my FoxIt.

__float• 1 month ago

Hmm, Sumatra PDF perhaps?

pteraspidomorph• 1 month ago

Have you tried foliate? Their embedded reader works quite well for me.

stonecharioteer6• 1 month ago

As someone who loves FoxIt reader, I'm building https://merrilin.ai to be the best damned ebook reader out there, to support PDF and epub. FoxIt's annotation system is one of the best I've experienced and I want to design one that is just as good if not better.

gabrieletrovato• 1 month ago

Building a robust annotation system for both PDF and EPUB is a tough technical challenge, but definitely needed. I've been working in a similar space and recently open-sourced it. It's a local-first 3D library for organizing and reading EPUBs and PDFs directly in the browser. It's called KoreShelf on Github

frollogaston• 1 month ago

I'd prefer pdf from the publisher because it'll lay out the same way on my side vs theirs, or if they give epub then I'm converting to pdf for the reason you said.

Tomte• 1 month ago

Okular.

It‘s working great on Windows, as well.

hardwaresofton5• 1 month ago

BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists:

https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/

More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached.

[EDIT]

Great experience blogs on the PineNote

https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/

https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...

ndiddy5• 1 month ago

Have you tried the PineNote yourself? It $400 and says that it's "aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux." The community provided firmware they link for it hasn't been updated in over a year.

The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.

hardwaresofton5• 1 month ago

More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached.

This note was in the original comment, did you read it? The fact that it is $400 (more expensive) and has less out of the box software is literally mentioned to alert people to that.

The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader functionality.

This is patently false, the latest Kobo Libra Color is using secure boot which completely locks out custom development:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=363175

So much so that QuillOS which used to be Kobo focused rewrote to support the PineNote

https://github.com/Quill-OS/quill

https://quill-os.org/

The point is to buy hardware that is built for you to freely modify and fully own, from the start.

My post was to make sure everyone knew the PineNote was an option, because I certainly did not know it until someone on HN made me aware.

Could you maybe make your point more concrete? Are you attempting to completely dissuade people from using the PineNote because it may not be easy to side load apps to it on hacker news?. Obviously different people have different propensities to do hacking, and some may not be able to afford the PineNote due to how expensive it is, but it's not clear what the goal of your comment was.

If your goal was "invest in Kobo instead of PineNote", I disagree with that. I'm not interested in investing (whether money or time) in an ecosystem that is just going to rug pull me eventually, over nickels and dimes.

BTW for those who agree, another great option is XTeink -- very hackable, and I've bought one myself:

https://www.xteink.com/

And there's a Linux phone out there which looks pretty encouraging too:

https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1splus/

Graphene is likely still the easier more polished option, but it's great to have options these days.

utopiah2• 1 month ago

I have a PineNote but also (had a Remarkable 1 a while ago) a Remarkable2 and RM Pro. I also gifted a PocketBook Verse Pro and installed Koreader on it.

Basically if you want a "product" to use right now and still want to tinker, RM gives you ssh access to a system you can tinker with. RM2 has the best community support for now though.

PineNote works... but yes you will have to be ready to tinker. It's heavy and think but powerful, all the way to having a browser, audio, microSD, etc.

Meanwhile the PocketBook Verse Pro just works, no tinkering, but also tiny and not get for sketches IMHO.

timeinput2• 1 month ago

I have a pine note. It lives up to that description. It's "fine", but I like to use it as an e ink laptop (well terminal with occasional other uses) with a bluetooth keyboard. I don't know that I would even want to start on using it as an ebook reader. It's bulky / heavy, and just doesn't match my kobo. I imagine asking it to do DRM ebooks would just be a non-starter.

I tried to turn a kobo into an eink terminal, and basically failed at getting it to the state I wanted it to be in, so the pine note is nice, but as a plug and play ereader it would be a hard sell for me.

pluralmonad• 1 month ago

Thanks for this call out. I have not checked on Pine devices much since a disappointing early Pinebook.

hardwaresofton5• 1 month ago

No worries, and thanks for your service -- people buying possibly-disappointing early devices definitely enables the newer devices to exist :)

spaghettifythis• 1 month ago

Also worth checking out, this guy's Open-Source 60hz e-ink screen: [video] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4

ndiddy5• 1 month ago

I saw that video a few days ago. It's really neat tech, but I'm curious what people are using the small external monitors for. I'm a big e-ink fan and really want to buy one because it's neat tech, but I can't come up with a use case where it makes sense for me. Any time I'm using a laptop on a desk, ideally I would want a larger monitor so I don't have to keep looking down (hurts your neck). If I'm lying down or on the couch, I would want a standalone device so I don't have to deal with the cords sticking out of the monitor or being tethered to a computer. I know portable e-ink displays have been a thing for nearly a decade at this point, so there must be a reason why people are buying them. If anyone reading this has one, what do you use it for?

port112• 1 month ago

I mean, it’s expensive, huge, and potentially unstable; not exactly what I’d want to read in bed at night.

The Pine projects are necessary and well-motivated, but the PineNote doesn’t strike me as a reader’s device, maybe a hacker’s or someone that wants an e-ink tablet.

yoavm4• 1 month ago

One can also just run Linux on most Kobos. I wrote and am using this every day: https://github.com/bjesus/air

hardwaresofton5• 1 month ago

Wow, had no idea this existed, thanks for writing it and sharing it!

Anonyneko• 1 month ago

Amazing! Do you know if anyone tried to run this on a Sage?

After getting that Kobo I realized that my hyper specific reading needs require a web browser with extension support (in particular support for Yomitan or similar dictionaries; the built-in dictionary functions on e-readers are awful for most non-English languages even with custom dictionaries, and KOReader isn't any better in that regard)

jolmg2• 1 month ago

What's the battery life like on Kobos running linux? Is it on the order of weeks, days, or hours?

gcanyon• 1 month ago

Is there a way to root the kobo and put a modern renderer in place?

MadnessASAP2• 1 month ago

Yes, for the ones I've owned rooting is very easy. KOReader and Plato are both popular (amongst the community of eReader rooting people) alternatives to the OEM software.

t-3• 1 month ago

It runs a standard linux and mounts as external storage when connected over USB. No need to "root" at all.

WorldMaker4• 1 month ago

The article's update points out that it switches to a modern renderer if you rename .epub to .kepub.epub, which seems like a dumb way to handle that rather than a DRM existence/version check, but that's not entirely unusual for backwards compatibility support shenanigans.

(Others point out that Calibre automatically will rename epub files to .kepub.epub for you if you use it to manage a Kobo library. It's just manually copying files to Kobo where you need to remember to do it yourself if you have a Kobo.)

itsthecourier• 1 month ago

bro, what an anchor to the past that framework is

k_sze• 1 month ago

The author says that "In a perfect world, RMSDK would just stop living in the CSS stone-ages or at least provide some kind of error handling instead of dropping the whole book, but I’m not holding my breath."

This is blatantly wrong.

In a perfect world, RMSDK wouldn't exist in the first place and Adobe would have gone bankrupt and become history at least 10 years ago.

m4634• 1 month ago

Actually - in a perfect world steve jobs would have written a missive about it and killed it from orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

mannyv• 1 month ago

"Epubcheck does basic CSS checking of course, but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!"

According to the author, Kobo uses CSS from 2013. A quick check with an AI says RMSDK supports CSS 2.1 and parts of 3.

So it's not that the renderer is broken, it's that he believed that epubcheck actually checks against devices and the versions of CSS that those devices support.

This is exactly the issue with test tools: the test tool tests to a spec, but the platform is the gold standard. If you don't like it tough shit.

WorldMaker4• 1 month ago

The CSS 1 spec says to robustly ignore lines you don't understand. Adobe didn't need to predict CSS 4, they needed to better implement CSS 1.

pmontra• 1 month ago

I understand the frustration of the author but how many readers do have an old, unupgraded, maybe unupgradable epub reader? If authors want to make their work available to all readers they have to build for the least common denominator. If it happens to be something from 2013, sorry but that's the reality of the market.

graeme• 1 month ago

I read this as saying a new Kobo in 2026 uses Adobe drm software that has css rules stuck in 2013.

qubidt2• 1 month ago

The issue the author is explaining is relevant for the Kobo devices currently being sold

protocolture• 1 month ago

I once read an ebook that was formatted by a guy who had only ever done magazines and it was a huge mess. 2 columns of text per page. No auto scaling.

The best ebook format I have ever experienced is .txt and just let the software figure out where the text needs to go.

microflash• 1 month ago

Many ePub readers allow you to ignore formatting. And that’s exactly what I do.

TiredOfLife• 1 month ago

The best format was fb2

Self-Perfection• 1 month ago

Why "was"? I still read books in fb2.

nanapipirara• 1 month ago

I’m supposed to be able to lend ebooks from my local library. Adobe makes it impossible as their software doesn’t run on my macbook…

themadturk2• 1 month ago

Adobe Digital Editions runs on my MacBook Air M3 with macOS Tahoe. What problem do you see?

(FWIW, ADE will probably die when Rosetta support goes away with MacOS 28, but one of the de-DRM plugins will read acsm files directly and bring in the books.)

insumanth• 1 month ago

that bloated pinnacle of software that is 80% about DRM, 20% about the reading experience

I have never seen someone explain the adobe software so perfectly. Using any adobe software is exactly this.

matwood• 1 month ago

Unfortunately this is any reader software that deals with publishers who require DRM. IME, the vast majority of bugs also come from the DRM.

latexr• 1 month ago

I’m curious if simply running the original EPUB through Kepubify fixes the problem.

https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

bowsamic• 1 month ago

ePub compatibility issues are one of the worst parts of having a Kobo reader. I genuinely miss my Kindle and its simple but reliable MOBI format. At least there everything worked

ornornor3• 1 month ago

I don’t miss my kindle, at all. Its text layout engine was a joke (every page edge was ragged!), you depend very heavily on amazons goodwill to keep allowing you, the device owner, to sideload your own books, it’s getting harder to install third party software, and well that one is personal but it’s from Amazon.

I’ve switched to kobos (Clara HD) and I’ve had to for years. It’s chugging along (had to 3d print a replacement power button a couple months ago), I can run koreader no problem and use calibre with the kobo plugin. And the default rendering engine in kobo’s firmware does actually typeset the text: no ragged edges!

ceving• 1 month ago

If nobody is able to implement the standard it is probably not amazing.

ornornor3• 1 month ago

If you use a kobo you have to give koreader a whirl! The only thing missing for me is the unified view of the library: koreader requires you to navigate to the subdirectory to open your ebook whereas nickel (kobo’s UI) will list them all in one library regardless of how deeply nested they are.

Everything else is better with koreader and it’s super easy to install alongside nickel. And it works very well with calibre + the kobo plugin.

martin-• 1 month ago

There are several plugins that give you a library view based on metadata instead of folders and filenames. Two examples that are both great:

https://github.com/AndyHazz/bookshelf.koplugin

https://github.com/joshuacant/ProjectTitle

ornornor3• 1 month ago

Thanks, I had no idea, these look great!

themadturk2• 1 month ago

You can also play with Calibre's default transfer template so all book files go into a single folder of your choice on the device. Then you can set your KOReader home or favorites folder and see everything in one place.

icantevenhold3• 1 month ago

I recently was in the market for a new e-reader and steered away from Kobo and Kindle because of their non-free ecosystem. I don’t know how exactly it would negatively impact me but I didn’t want to find out.

Got a refurbished pocketbook in the end and very happy with it, it reads all imaginable file formats and I can just send books to it via email or cable.

dakolli3• 1 month ago

I don't really have an issue with kindle, I just download anything off of z-library and use the email to kindle tool. I haven't given Amazon a penny other than from the original purchase of the kindle. I only have used epub/pdf (and will never have a need for another format).

boredhedgehog• 1 month ago

Technically you already have need of another format, because Kindles don't support epub, and your books get converted before the transfer.

RetroTechie• 1 month ago

Quoted from here:

https://informatecdigital.com/en/Send-to-Kindle%3A-all-ways-...

"This service is free and works with both Kindle devices such as with the Kindle appIt also automatically converts many files to Amazon's internal format (such as AZW3 or KFX), as long as you respect its supported file types and size limits."

Read: requires internet connectivity to put documents on your Kindle. Depends on Amazons 'blessing'. Ends when Amazon ends support for your device. Is limited to whatever document formats (and sizes) Amazon decides to support. Internal formats on your Kindle may be DRM locked. Amazon could snoop any document transferred through that service. Could be turned into a paid service @ some point. Amazon could effectively brick your device if so desired.

(please correct if I misunderstand any of the above)

Sure, this may work for many users & they may be happy with that arrangement. But it's quite a few drawbacks. And the "planned obsolesence" smell is strong here. Me... I'll pass.

bayindirh• 1 month ago

When using Kobo readers, using Calibre and Kobo utilities, which transparently "upgrades" your ePUBs to KePUBs without altering the copy on your disk is a must, and a huge win.

Kobo's added features on top of ePUBs are nice, and their renderer is much better than Adobe's standard pipeline.

So, it's a free upgrade with a terrific local library added on top.

p-t• 1 month ago

imho for a standard epub there should be as little CSS as possible

aboardRat42• 1 month ago

Hot take: you don't need CSS in your book, a few of <style:'width: 100%;'> is enough.

rglover• 1 month ago

Mentioned at the end, but Kobo's gel better with the KEPUB format. Calibre has a nice converter for this (I think it may be built-in now or still a plugin), but works great. Got a Kobo Clara Colour about ~2 years ago now and I couldn't highlight across pages until I bulk converted my library to KEPUBs. After that, you'd never know there was an issue. This post makes the whole mess make a lot more sense now.

cjfidpwmwn• 1 month ago

Is it just more or hn has become a place to come and complain and consume tech drama disguised as a tech forum? It's all "I hate dario ", "I hate altman", "corporations are evil".

It's getting very tiresome.

projektfu2• 1 month ago

This was originally posted with the full title, which made sense. Why was it truncated?

Retr0id• 1 month ago

Presumably to make it sound less like LLM output.

projektfu2• 1 month ago

I just don't get it when the title changes to something uninteresting. It wasn't click-bait before, but now it's almost meaningless.

mawise• 1 month ago

Sharing my experience as a tinkerer, sideloader, and recent Kobo owner.

I used a Kindle for ages, always in airplane mode and only sideloading content. Honestly, it was a pretty good setup.[1] But it seemed like it would be harder to setup this way on newer devices, so when mine finally failed, I got a Kobo Clara BW. I was thrilled I could boot it up in "sideloader mode" and not even register it or enable wifi.

I noticed poor typography on my epubs, learned about converting to kepub so I did that (which helped). It was a familiar flow to what I was used to converting to azw3 for the Kindle. My remaining typography gripe with kepubs is that it treats a word+em-dash as a word for inserting space in full justification. Em-dashes generally don't have spaces on either side, this often looks like a space has been inserted only to the right of the em-dash.

I went down the rabbit hole of NickelMenu and other readers including KOReader and Plato, and even tried (and mostly failed) to vibecode my own opds client app. (because KOReader which has one built-in felt overwhelming)

My current sense is the device feels so much more like it is mine. I have much more flexibility to tinker with it. It is not as polished as the Kindle and the Adobe rendering feels stupid, but that's also a sharp edge that only the side-loading community will hit, most of whom use Calibre which can auto convert to kepub for them. Everyone else is buying books from the Kobo store and getting them delivered as kepubs.

So in the end, I'm a big fan of the Kobo devices.

[1]: Except you cannot remove a wifi password if you aren't in range of that wifi signal. I had a rude experience when my two-year-old was fiddling with my Kindle at my in-laws' house and turned on the wifi where there was still a saved credential. An update triggered immediately and I was frustrated for days that everything in the UI changed.

GoblinSlayer6• 1 month ago

An update triggered immediately and I was frustrated for days that everything in the UI changed.

You tried to forget that you don't own anything.

KerrickStaley• 1 month ago

I use KOreader on my Kobo, which is an alternative open-source ebook renderer. It installs pretty easily without rooting the device. In addition to better standards compliance it also is a lot more performant and has niceties like auto cropping of PDFs.

murzynalbinos• 1 month ago

epubcheck doing its job perfectly while Adobe's ancient RMSDK (frozen somewhere around 2013) silently chokes on valid CSS4 like min() is peak digital publishing pain. The fact that Kobo routes normal .epub to the Adobe engine and only .kepub.epub gets the modern WebKit one feels almost malicious.

watersb• 1 month ago

I wonder what this writer's ePub are like.

I can't tell what the writing or design are like, because the article renders as a blank page on my old iPad.

Also on my 2026 Kindle Paperwhite.

It's futile to be old man yelling at cloud on HN, but I'm still irritated by web pages that are essentially text, yet can't be bothered to actually display anything. A blank page.

Presumably ePub publications are easier to QA than web pages. They must conform to a subset of web standards.

paradox460• 1 month ago

It constantly amazes me that something like Koreader is so good, yet software made by paid professionals can be so bad.

Surely it would be easier for someone like kobo to just use Koreader, implement their ui changes and demand as plugins or patches, and forget ade

Your ePub Is fine

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