I agree, it was Apple’s decision, and it is one decision I get really irritated about.

I got an iPhone mainly to try it out, after years of using WM and Palm devices and while I love some parts of it, others really leave me frustrated.

What I hope is that as the platform Matures a bit, Apple will relax their control mania at least a bit.

A lot of potential Applications (besides reading) could work much better if Apple allowed Apps to communicate and access a common dataset.

It’s not a bug or a missing feature: they deliberately made this choice and if they don’t get a lot of negative press about it, I doubt that it’ll change.

While I understand and agree that the problem is outside the control of the App developers, and due to limitations place by apple, they are still important and relevant.
(I miss the Mount as HD option from the older iPods)

For most people, it would not really matter what is the App developers fault and what is Apples fault. They are more likely to blame it on the App developer.

As I said, its something that need to be fixed, and hopefully will be by Apple sometime in the future.

While Stanza and others offer desktop clients to get stuff on them, the major pitfall is that they require you to be on a network, and that to a private network to do so.

While Someone reasonably tech savy can do it, it is not easy, and can at times be very frustrating, not to mention slow, depending on your network speeds.

And what are you supposed to do when you are out on the road and need to add a book or document to your iPhone / Touch?

Whats needed is the ability to add and manage information in apps over the USB cable, perhaps through a sub menu in itunes, or a third part program which could act as an intermediary.

This would make it VERY easy to get good content into Stanza for the iPhone, as well as a great way to get more ePub content.

(Don’t get me wrong, Stanza already does a great job converting to ePub, it just needs some minor improvements.)