I used a fixed background image on my site www.jmarshamichler.com (below the ebooks) and it works great on Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. The image does not work at all on my ipad using either the Mercury browser, or the Safari browser. It shows up as an out of focus stationary blob. Is there a reason for this? Is there anything that can be done to make it work? I like the effect of the image, but cannot use it if it won't on ipad !

The issue there is probably with using fixed position settings. Try switching that back to Static so that the image is not stretched.