“Your EPUB is fine. Kobo disagrees. Blame Adobe.”

An infuriating story about something most of us don't really stop to think about: e-books and the rendering engines companies and software use to display them.

It's the year 2026. Thanks to the horrendous [Adobe] RMSDK which Kobo decided to use as their backbone for all book rendering (probably for DRM reasons), a single line of perfectly valid CSS turns a perfectly valid EPUB file into a corrupted file" on Kobo and just drops the whole book. No clear error message, no fallback. Just a massive fail.

Andre Klein

The level of obnoxiousness goes even deeper: Kobo devices ship with a better, actually maintained renderer for e-books as well, but in order to have a book use it, the book file in question needs to have a specific file extension. Remember that e-book files are just packaged websites; there's no reason to do any of this nonsense with two rendering engines, one of which is shit and frozen in time.

I have never had to do anything related to creating an e-book - I just put books on my own Kobo and read them - and even I am getting annoyed just reading this.