Quote:
Originally Posted by ziegl027
Piles of printouts aren't PDF's anymore, either, they're ink on pulped trees.
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While this sounds like a good argument, it is in fact irrelevant: a PDF printed out on paper will look, in almost all cases, 100% like the PDF on screen. This is partially what PDF was designed for, after all.
A PDF converted to a format your eBook reader understands is however a completely different matter. In my experience tables get messed up, images are moved from their position inline to between parts of text, equations are seldom kept intact, footnotes are often found either halfway through text or sometimes even at the end of the book, and all this is assuming you are converting a text-based PDF and not a scanned-image one, which converts even worse - if at all. The best way to view a PDF on an eBook reader, at this moment, is in its original format.
Of course every rule has its exceptions, and indeed some PDF's with mostly text or only the occasional image here and there and no footnotes, tables, equations or other layout quirks will be converted quite well. Sadly for us academics, almost no serious paper falls into this catagory. I have all but given up on reading those on my eReader in fact, realising you simply cannot expect something designed for A4 format to look exactly the same on a screen barely a quarter the size - in this I fully agree with you. If your main purpose is to read papers on an eReader, I very strongly suggest getting something with a big enough screen to display them in their original layout - which means at least 10" or so.
On a more ontopic note: the PRS-600 allows you to make annotations, highlights and bookmarks (as well as full-text search on a per-book basis). Annotations can be both text- as well as freehand based. There is a 100-character limit on exporting highlights to a PC though, probably for copyright reasons. In this regard it is well suited for academic purposes, were it not for its limiting 6" screensize.