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  • Hacker News
  • Adobe Digital Editions and RMSDK were recently sold to Wipro Engineering: https://helpx.adobe.com/enterprise/kb/eol-faq-adobe-digital-...
    by tech234a
  • 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).

    by badsectoracula
  • 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
    by chocolatkey
  • 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...

    by hardwaresofton
  • 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.
    by lidavidm
  • 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

    by tannhaeuser
  • 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.

    by nfw2
  • 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.

    by acdha

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