I have just tested more traditional EPUB - https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/bookdown.epub on clean installations of Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS.
It renders normally. Moreover your example EPUB renders normally.
But on my main laptop with 16.04 and manually installed Adobe Acrobat Reader (9.5.5-1precise1 package at 9.5.5-1precise1 version) and OpenJDK it fails as you wrote.
Consider to (maybe temporary) to use one of Okular, KCHMviewer or ebook-viewer from Calibre package.