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