A friend who works for Apple pointed out that gmail will open PDF, Doc, and RTF, and you could read those formats via that route on the iPad. Perhaps Safari could even save them as web files, which is something I used to do in the past to save fics. I'm hesitant about the iPad, though, because I'm worried Apple is being all control freak. No flash is bad enough, but if I can't install Firefox instead of Safari, I'll smash the damn tablet. I'm going to go have a look at it when the campus computer store gets them. It's a lot of money for no flash and no Mozilla. I know it's not a laptop, but still.

ePub does seem to be the emerging standard for eBooks, and I see that Gutenberg is now providing ePub, which is exciting.