Ebook Fixed Layout in Kobo

Question

Hi!I work at a portuguese publisher, Shantarin, a multilingual/bilingual publisher that for now publishes only portuguese poetry.We are starting to do E-books, but we have some questions. We are having some issues with the fixed format (this format would be better for us because, as a poetry publisher, our aim is to have the portuguese and the translation side by side, so that the costumer can read both and see the "differences").We have some EPUBs finished, and in the Apple reader app, it's fine, but we tried it in a Kobo E-reader (Kobo Nia, the smallest one) and it doesn't work. And we don't know why. Has it happened to anyone?

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

What you've discovered is that EPUB depends almost entirely on the reader, and hardly any two EPUB readers are the same. There is a "vanilla" tier of readers that hew closely to the EPUB standard, with Thorium Reader and Calibre Reader the best of that class. It's recommended that you do all your development, tweaking and testing using one or both to evaluate the results, as this will give you the most consistent, standards-based document.

(Technical note: this recommendation used to be Thorium alone, as a reader produced by a group dedicated to adhering to and advancing standards for EPUB, but current versions have one persistent bug in font size display, so Calibre is a good backup with a few minor flaws of its own.)

Nearly every other reader out there has one of two flaws: it's outdated and will be tripped up by newer features, or it's proprietary (Such as Apple's is), or it's "improved" by the developer, making it some degree of incompatible with baseline EPUB documents.

So to start with, evaluate your exports in Thorium/Calibre. If Apple is to be a big market, you can usually tweak the EPUB to work in iBooks while not losing the basic compatibility (and that's the direction to go... don't optimize it for Apple and then try to make it compatible with generic readers.)

I am not sure how generic/standards based the Kobo readers are. But if they are common for your market, and a Thorium-okayed EPUB doesn't display correctly on them, that would be another step of tweaking for compatiblity. It gets both easier and harder, as fixes that accommodate one nonstandard reader often help on others.

Happy to answer any questions on the process. You might find this summary post to be useful as well.

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