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Page images, however we do them!
I'm late to the party, but let me toss one more grenade into the room: Page images are the general case, and reflowable text is a special case, which we only need because we have another 10-15 years to go before a truly mature high-res (1000 DPI or higher) low-power reflective flat display technology becomes cheap and ubiquitous. For anything but pure text, page images are essential. In my business (computer books) reflowable text has been tried (think HTML) and in my view has been a disaster.
This isn't just me being an old guy; I've asked my readers and my customers, and their response is consistent: Except for fiction and illustration-free nonfiction, PDF is the only thing that works. Reflowing can be done where necessary--even from a PDF, given proper software--but it is a compromise made necessary by low-res displays, catering to only one slice of the publishing business.
My vote isn't precisely for PDFs but for page images, and PDFs are how page images are currently done. I'd cheer for a better PDF format, and the format may improve over time. I read PDFs very successfully on my X41 Tablet PC right now, and will read them on the descendants of the Sony Reader and the Iliad as digital paper resolution improves. My Sony Reader is good for fiction and that's what I use it for. Technical books, magazines, and anything depending in any way on photos, tables, equations, or drawn art requires PDF to be an ebook, and that's probably two thirds of what I read. (Most of it, alas, is still on paper and paper only.)
The industry is still young. Let's take the question up again in five years and see how things have gone.
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