>but of course we know that that's not true,
not on the face of it.  there's a browser on
the ipad, so anything that's out on the web
is something the ipad can readily display...

I still think there is some fundamental misunderstanding here.  Using the iPad I go on the web to PG.  I see a ePub book I like there.  I use the iPad web browser to go there.  I click on the ePUB book.  iPad says “sorry Hal I can’t allow you to read that book.” I don’t see how you can say that the iPad “readily displays” something when it explicitly tells me that it refuses to display that something!

I take my cheap crappy generic netbook, I go on the web to PG.  I see a ePub book I like there.  I use the cheap crappy generic netbook’s web browser to go there.  I click on the ePUB book.  The cheap crappy netbook automatically downloads the ePUB book to the netbook so I can read it later in an airplane or on the beach, and it automatically opens it and I start reading.  The netbook DOES “readily display” anything that’s out on the web.

>put it this way.  if i were to offer to pay you
$100 for every e-book you read on the ipad,
how many "e-books" could you find to "read"?

If you pay me $100 for every time I am part way through a book and then I pick up my iPad again and that book has magically disappeared because I am no longer in sight of a public wifi connection then I am going to come out way ahead.  This is silly, Comcast offers 100s of TV channels, but if I turn on the TV channel at any moment in time the probability is 95% that Comcast will have nothing on that *I* want to watch at that moment in time. I work hard to find what I want to read, and I work hard to find texts that I want to create to submit to PG, and most of what I want to read or what I want to create to submit to PG is NOT available via the current hardwired iPad applets each distributing texts from ONE server location on the internet.  If every site that offers free books writse its own applet specifically to support iPad rather than using their already existing HTML sites which support “real” HTML browsers, well, then I guess iPad would do what I want to do.  But I don’t understand why every organization out on the web offering free books has to write their own applet for iPad when they already HAVE written that applet -- its call an HTML web site – its just that Apple has deliberately pimped their web browser to make sure all these already existing “applets” aka HTML free ebook websites don’t work!