It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.
You can get $5 O'Reilly EPUBs from the App Store everyday.
Extracting an epub from an iPhone app is easy. First you unzip the .ipa file. Then you cd to Payload/*/book. Finally, you zip up the files to an .epub file: zip -X ~/book.epub mimetype && zip -r9DX ~/book.epub META-INF OEBPS.
mimetype must be first in the archive for validity, which you can test with EpubCheck.
I suppose everybody here knows the ins and outs of the browser landscape and has their own favorite. Most everybody else doesn't care about browsers and would find a selection screen annoying. Ubuntu has worked hard at reducing the effort to install an operating system, and such a screen goes against their philosophy. It's important to have sensible defaults.
Hopefully this means we can standardize data exchange on something like Ethernet so that if some faster technology is invented on the physical layer, it would be easy to upgrade. This scenario is what Bonjour is made for. Imagine plugging in any peripheral into any port. The peripheral would automatically assign itself an IP address with zeroconf, assign itself a name with mDNS, and advertise its capabilities through services discovery, all without requiring a DHCP server or DNS server. The backside of your computer would be one power port and a whole bunch of Light Peak ports. No more fudging around with USB, FireWire, BlueTooth, DisplayPort, DVI, VGA, all of which are incompatible with each other but do the same task of moving data around.
LG was never an ODM (sic). And they don't manufacture hard drives. Sure, they manufacture displays but so do Sharp and Philips. Also, I was under the impression that Lenovo merely acquired IBM's PC business. All the other companies are ODMs though.
I think it has to do more with policy than it does with the telcos. Japan, Korea, and Sweden are outliers which have had massive funding (direct and indirect) from the governments to build up their broadband infrastructures. The hands-off, let the market decide, strategy of the previous Republican administration has led to the largest commercial fiber deployment in the world (FiOS), but it isn't as far-reaching or speedy as the government-assisted rollouts. When you look at penetration rates and bandwidth capacities of different nations, the US is in the middle of the pack.
In regard to the printer sharing problem, it's pretty much solved today thanks to zeroconf (marketed as Bonjour by Apple). It makes addressing computers and advertising services in the local area network much easier. I wish more developers would take advantage of zeroconf.
The plugin is updated frequently also because doing so lands itself in the Most Popular Add-ons chart. Giorgio has a history of pushing the limit to see what he can get away before backtracking when someone calls him out on it.