Wow - fantastic response - thanks peeps!
BRISS .. ya know, I'd looked for something that did precisely this ages ago when I was trying to print a two-pages-on-A4 format and never found anything, so I'm mighty impressed to discover it now. Sadly no Debian package for it, but I'll struggle on!
From a workflow perspective do you normally tie this into calibre (can you even do that?) or just batch through a stack of them and keep a separate copy of those PDF's for copying onto your PB?
Tulapi - do you mean you just move around on the page (down a few times, then across and up, then down again?) I'll take paola's suggestion on and try a less busy PDF, but one of the appeals of a 9" display is that I can get the whole page (probably) on screen at one time, and a lot of the books that I'm thinking about benefit from being able to see the whole page. I find on my 28" desktop computer that I don't use the two-page view at all, so I'm optimistic the ease of reading will transfer to the 902.
jbaach - thank you so much for the link - I'm at work currently but shall read and watch the videos this evening.
I did look at the 903 - the idea of taking notes is interesting but I can't see any use case for myself (as in I've never read an ebook and thought it'd be handy to make a note on it). If I had the feature, I may use it, of course, but it's not a high priority I mean. Similarly the 3G / wifi features aren't things that appeal. But the cost delta from the 902 to the 903 is non-trivial, and really hard for me to justify. Heck, I'd probably be really happy with one of those mythical 901's ... but they appear to be as rare as rocking horse poo.
My understanding is that the 903 has identical CPU & RAM configuration as the 902 - so the performance (for reading) should be identical, yes?