Sure, we all swooned with delight when Apple CEO Steve Jobs showed us how we’ll be reading books on our iPad in the future, courtesy of the new iBooks app. But what if you want to load up your new device with e-books that aren’t from Apple’s own iBookstore?

That’s where your old pals at MacLife.com come in. You may be surprised to learn that there are literally millions of e-books out there already available in the iPad-friendly EPUB format, just a few finger taps away. Okay, we hear your cries: “How? Where? Must… acquire… knowledge…!!” Keep reading, dear visitor…

What is This EPUB Thing, Anyway?

EPUB is just another file format similar to Microsoft Word’s DOC or Adobe’s PDF. But EPUB is free and standardized, which means that pretty much every e-reader (and even a lot of desktop software) can understand and use such files. Apple chose EPUB for the iBooks app on the iPad, since it offers the most widely compatible experience. Some companies (including Apple) apply digital rights management (DRM) to their EPUB files, such as Sony has done in the past for their Reader hardware.

Oddly, the one big exception to the list of e-readers compatible with EPUB is Amazon’s popular Kindle, which can’t use the files without first being converted into another format that the hardware can understand (including PDF, TXT and the Kindle’s own AZW). Weird, right? We’re guessing that will change soon, especially if the iPad takes off.

Google = (Over) One Million Free Books

Sure, things between Apple and Google might not be so friendly these days, but where e-books are concerned, Google Books just wants to make sure you have plenty of stuff to read -- regardless of what platform or device you happen to be using. Last summer, they went nuts and posted over a million public domain books in the iPad-compatible EPUB format. The gigantic archive of books had already been available to select partners including Sony and Barnes and Noble, but those floodgates have been available to all for months now.

There is one caveat to Google Books, however (isn’t that always the case?): The search giant used optical character recognition (better known as OCR) to create their free EPUB files. OCR is generally pretty awesome, but only if you edit the document afterward to catch any mistakes… which Google didn’t do with their e-books. Just goes to show you, you get what you pay for. Buyer (or is that moocher?) beware.

Public Domain Done Right: epubBooks.com

Developer Mike Cook has taken it upon himself to reformat the public domain Project Gutenberg titles and make them available on his own epubBooks.com, free of charge. Why would someone do this? The Gutenberg e-books frequently have very basic formatting (if any at all), and a lot of them are only available as standard .TXT files. Cook used his skills with Perl and XSLT to write conversion tools to create his own EPUB files.

Of course, that means that most of the finds on epubBooks.com are the same as what’s already available on Google Books, with popular authors such as Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde and Edgar Rice Burroughs all present and accounted for. But Cook and his contributors have spent a lot of time to assure great quality for their free EPUB-format e-books, many of which even include black & white or even color illustrations. That effort has to be worth a look, right?

Read and Get Published on Feedbooks.com

Billed as “Food for the mind,” the Paris, France-based Feedbooks.com encompasses the usual thousands of public domain e-books, but also adds original works from new authors into the mix and even a publishing service to distribute your own work, should you have any.

Like epubBooks, the Feedbooks team developed their own technology to create e-books on the fly. Don’t worry, even though the company is French, the site is available in English language, and they offer a wide variety of e-books in the EPUB format in English, French, German, Spanish and even Russian languages. Their selection also features a number of DC Comics, including characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and Aquaman for when you tire of your Marvel Comics app.

Just the Classics, Please: ManyBooks.net

“The best e-books at the best price: Free!” touts the ManyBooks.net website, which offers strictly classic literature -- 26,688 of them, to be exact. The site is the work of Matthew McClintock, who has also tapped into the vast database at Project Gutenberg to build his virtual library of gratis e-books. McClintock’s site happily accepts donations to keep the wheels turning and to cover the costs of bandwidth, file storage and server hardware, but cheapskates can download all they can read, guilt-free.

For the Kiddies: Snee.com

A more limited selection of titles is available at Snee.com, which once again uses Project Gutenberg public domain titles but fancies them up with plenty of pictures for the young’uns. The Snee collection is aimed strictly at the tykes, with popular titles such as Little Bo-Peep, The Three Bears and The Sleeping Beauty yours for the (free) taking.

Don’t Forget Your Local Library

Did you know that thousands of local libraries now feature digital libraries online? Thanks to the Overdrive service, libraries have made a splash with free downloadable content in the EPUB format, and it’s quick and easy to find out if you can take advantage of the service by searching for your local library online. A quick search of our local library turned up thousands of titles available for the taking, so once you’ve exhausted the other choices presented here, grab your library card and get downloading. (Note that many libraries also feature e-books in Adobe PDF or other formats, which won’t work on your trusty new iPad without conversion.)

Straight to the Source: Project Gutenberg

If you have a little more patience and are more forgiving of the end results, you can head straight to the Project Gutenberg website and find over 30,000 free e-books (and thanks to their partners around the world, more than 100,000 other e-books are also available).

These books are made available at no cost in the U.S. because their copyright has expired, so they’re now in the public domain and available to anyone, for any use. The downside is, that means you’re stuck with the classics, written by authors who have long since left this mortal coil. But, maybe you can’t get enough of those books, you know?

Support The Indies with Smashwords

By this point, even the cheapest of cheapskates among you have probably tired of hearing the word “free,” especially since that generally equates to “public domain” where e-books are concerned. If you’re looking for an EPUB source that’s slightly off the beaten path and where your money still gets you a tremendous bargain, there’s always Smashwords.com.

Smashwords is an e-book publishing and distribution center for independent authors. Their selection includes novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays or “other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet.”

Best of all, it’s free to publish and distribute via Smashwords, and the authors are in full control over how their work is published, sampled, priced and sold. That means some e-books are free, some are dirt cheap and some are priced more traditionally -- it all depends on what you’re looking for. The site touts over 3,500 serious writers and 100 independent publishers among their stable. Not surprisingly, a quick glance at Smashwords’ most-downloaded titles finds that it’s the free ones that get the most action -- so aspiring e-book publishers, don’t quit that day job just yet.

When All Else Fails: Barnes & Noble eReader (or Amazon Kindle)

If your tastes run more current or commercial, then you might have to be patient -- while Amazon.com just updated their Kindle for iPhone app to version 2.0, a universal build to include iPad compatibility, Barnes & Noble is still missing in action for launch day.

Of course, Kindle doesn’t use or support the EPUB format, so they don’t really count -- but Barnes & Noble does, and is probably the top dog in the paid EPUB world. If you already happen to use the B&N eReader for iPhone and have some books downloaded there, you can always install it on your iPad and use pixel-doubling to fill the screen… but we can only imagine that will probably send you even faster into the loving embrace of the iBookstore. (Thanks to DRM, you won’t be able to load your B&N e-books into iBooks, sorry.)

Roll Your Own EPUBs

If you don’t have any luck finding just the right EPUB documents to install on your iPad, why not make your own? Thankfully, there are at least a couple of tools available to convert standard PDF files into EPUB format -- and both of them are absolutely free.

The top dog in the “create your own” race has to be Calibre, the multi-platform e-book management software that converts not only from PDF to EPUB, but a whole bunch of others as well (seriously, there’s a long list on their website). The project is supported by donations and the downloadable application may not be for the faint of heart, but the site offers plenty of support if you get lost.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you just want to get the job done quickly, there’s EPUB2Go.com, a free website that does one thing only -- converts a PDF file into an EPUB file. Tell the site where your file is (either on your computer or at an Internet address) and you’re off and running. The simplistic site was designed to aid folks in getting their PDF files onto the iPhone version of free e-book reader Stanza, so it’s about as simple as it gets.

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It will be interesting to see how Apple’s new iPad affects the e-book market, which has been fractured and slow to take hold over the years. That just means that Cupertino has nowhere to go but up with iBooks and the iBookstore -- even with all of this mostly free EPUB competition floating around the Internet.