Let’s crowd source a great big list of reasons to ditch EPUB 2 and upgrade your ebooks to EPUB 3. What are the fundamental reasons to stick with EPUB 2? I would love to hear from these developers. It could be that I am missing something big. I am happy to report that I haven’t personally touched EPUB 2 for eighteen months. But we have, thankfully, moved on to EPUB 3. For technical reasons we were required to stick to EPUB 2 until early 2016. I produce a trio of ebooks for Publisher’s Weekly several times a year which get distributed via Ingram to Netgalley, major retailers, Overdrive, and Edelweiss. It could be that mostly self-publishers using cheap-to-free and out-of-date converters make up the bulk of these EPUB 2 producers. Or it might be that a well-established workflow is just too tricky to change when the benefits feel ethereal and unclear. It could be that large companies can’t change very quickly. It could be because developers are accustomed to their tools and are reluctant to change. The old tools stills work, and the ebooks they produce aren’t rejected so why change? It is a steep learning curve for someone who doesn’t come at this from a technical field like, say, web development. As someone who learned how to make ebooks when there weren’t a lot of resources about how, I can empathize. Ben Dugas of Kobo reports that EPUB 2 makes up about 70% of incoming content. The word on the street is that the majority of ebooks submitted to various retailers are still native EPUB 2.
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