well, jim, i'm sorry you wasted some of your time following up on michael's suggestions. but i think if you would have phrased your complaints a bit better in the first place, you could've avoided the misunderstanding. i'm not just talking about your disingenuous means of (mis)defining terms like "e-book", either (although that is a serious error too), but a bad case of failure to qualify yourself. to my point, if you would have said this...
i have found it impossible to download the books i want from the sites i want in the formats i want such that i can read them in the viewer-apps i want...
...you wouldn't have engendered opposition. indeed, you might have gotten a whole lot of sympathy. (or, realistically, a little bit.) and perhaps even received a few pointers... but that's not what you said, not at the outset. what you said initially sounded more like:
the ipad is so locked down that you can only get the e-books steve jobs allows you to get, and that sucks...
that's a paraphrase, of course, but i think that that's what it sounded like to people. 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... 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"? yeah, that's what i thought; no shortage then. yes, there is a walled-in, locked-up section of the ipad, but we all know about that, and what good does it do to bitch about it here? it contributes nothing productive to a thread. to sum up, hyperbole doesn't work well if you don't know how to work it well... -bowerbird