flameproof, it's easy as pie. Just use iFunBox, and you can copy whatever you need from your iPad to a traditional computer in a blink of an eye.
iPad is the perfect reader device for me. Marvin for real e-books, and GoodReader for fake e-books = PDF files, which are books not available as EPUBs. If I could push a magic button and convert all PDFs to tolerably formatted EPUBs that way, so that I could read all books in Marvin and never see a PDF file again in my life, that's what I'd do. Sadly, life doesn't work that way.
(Naturally, there are huge areas of improvement for both Marvin and GoodReader, but that's another topic.)