To be perfectly blunt, Fixed Layout EPUB pretty much sucks on Windows and Android-not because of something inherently wrong with the format (though, there are purists that will tell you it’s an abomination) but because there’s no reliable reader application for it. Since Adobe is creating the output and developing the reader, everything should be fine, right? Well, yeah…it should be. You see, Adobe has its own reader for EPUBs – Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). Why? Ask the developers because I don’t know. Readium on the other hand has gone straight to hell. They render everything beautifully and honor all of the animations that are supported in InDesign. IBooks on iOS and MacOS are still terrific. The bonus for iBooks was it was pre-installed on every Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Android to the best of my knowledge has never been overly friendly for Fixed Layout EPUB. Back in 2014 when Adobe first added interactive Fixed Layout capabilities to InDesign, my go-to EPUB reader on Windows was Readium and on Mac and iOS, iBooks was the best choice. If you know anything about EPUB (and if you’re still reading I’ll go out on a limb and assume you do), you know that the quality of the user experience, especially when it comes to fixed layout, is highly dependent upon the reader application. In fact, in one very important way, they’ve gotten worse. Truth be told, I’m still excited about it-the interactive features and the user experience is terrific-but when I wrote my original article in 2014, I expected things to get better over time and unfortunately, they haven’t. Looking back, though, it was more than three years ago, so in that sense, the future is now.
Seems like just yesterday I was super excited about the future of Fixed Layout EPUB.
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