This is where the real potential of e-books shines, in my opinion. A chance to bypass the publishing industry, and potentially to let smaller publishing houses easily mass distribute breakout works.

Hey Paul, you ever done anything on the best e-readers for each of the non-"big" systems? Forgetting Kindle or Nook... but the best readers for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Mobile, and desktop OSs (Windows, Apple, Linux)?

Yes indeed, I really don't think Paul has done enough about the ipad. Good call Joe.

Har har. ipad is niche. I was thinking more for the iphone+droid+winmo+crackberry crowd, which is basically everyone else. Showing them what to download and what to use could get more people turned onto ebooks.

Creating epub formatted books is simple. Its the other weird formats, or your starting format (grrr, PDF! I hates you! PDF is not a valid ebook format!) that cause problems. Personally, I use Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/) to manage my ebook library and convert between various formats. It even has a content server that Stanza on iPhone can use to download books directly, or you can sideload the generated epub files onto your iPad through iTunes.

If you're more interested in creating ebooks rather than converting from one format to another (yes, plain text is a format), you might want to look at Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/).

"What's more, if you mail ePub Bud a children's book, they'll scan it in for you."

I'm surprised that doesn't violate copyright law. Not that I think it SHOULD. I'm just surprised that it doesn't.