Thanks to all for providing feedback and issue reports. There are numerous fixes and improvements in this release, the most important summarized below. (For a complete list of changes, refer to the changes committed from revision 242 [2] to revision 288 [3].)

* One of the most critical bugs fixed in this release is issue 133 [4], which meant that EPUB 3.0 Navigation Documents were not validated completely (one of its normative schemas was skipped).

* As Bogdan has announced before, EPUBCheck now (via the "-save" command) has the ability to store a created .epub archive when EPUBCheck is run against an "expanded archive" aka filesystem container. Issue 131 [5], which is still open, discusses issues that has occurred when using these archives in the real world (with Sigil).

Changes made yesterday [6] *may* have resulted in these issues/incompatibilities being fixed, but this is by no means guaranteed. So: if you use the -save feature at all, use it with maximum caution, and test the output very carefully in various reading systems and authoring tools. At this point, we do NOT guarantee that the output .epub is valid/works everywhere, so use -save only at your on risk, and prefer using a tried and trusted archive creation tool instead if you have one handy.

The "-save" command now also has changed in the sense that if the expanded archive is not valid, then the .epub archive is not stored. This is to avoid EPUBCheck becoming a source for proliferation of invalid content.

* This release ships with experimental code addressing Issue 124 [7]. This is (partly) about issuing warnings when "non-uri-safe" characters are used in filenames. Your input on the behavior of these tests is warmly welcome; we are not sure where to go with this at the moment, these tests could be dropped, modified, or kept as-is.

We are deeply grateful for the testing and input provided so far, and hope that you have enough endurance to give beta3 a run as well.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/downloads/detail?name=epubcheck-3....
[2] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/source/detail?r=242
[3] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/source/detail?r=288
[4] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/issues/detail?id=133
[5] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/issues/detail?id=131
[6] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/source/detail?r=288
[7] http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/issues/detail?id=124