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I'm thinking more about the .PDF reader aspect of the device. I have tons of .PDF files. I've only recently started collecting ePubs.
In crop mode, it only lets me select one screen area for the whole page. In some of my files, the type is sufficiently small and the page sufficiently big that I have to turn the device landscape to get the text large enough to read, in addition to killing the margins. I can't use crop mode on them, because they will only show me the top section of the page (not quite half of the page, in many cases). If I turn landscape on a page with portait dimensions, I need the ability to mark 2 or 3 different cropped sections on the page. They may have some overlap. Forward and back buttons should iterate through those different sections before moving to the next/prior page.
In page mode, I can stretch the image, zooming in enough that the text becomes readable. I can drag the left, right, up or down to see all the page (works better on an LCD than eInk, but that's just a shortcoming of eInk tech). That's reasonable. I can't drag my way onto the next or previous page (that I'm aware of; feel free to correct me if I just haven't figured this out). The only way I know of to get to the next page is to use the forward button. When it gets to the next page, it loses my zoomed settings. Ideally, if I zoom in and move to another page, it should remember my zoom settings and my offset from the top left corner. Even better, if the even and odd pages have slightly different margins on them, it should allow me to adjust the offset for each and have it remember them from one page to the next.
For some of my files, the rendering is painfully slow. Ideally, when I open a .PDF, it would render and display the current page, then render (in the background) and cache the prior page and the next page. Then, when I hit forward, it would take me to the pre-rendered image of the next page, very quickly, and start rendering the following page in the background. If it only holds 3 pages in memory at any given time, that should keep the memory requirements down but still allow it to move from one page to the next (typical reading pattern) with very little delay. I had a PDF reader which I used on my old Tapwave Zodiac which did this, and it was very speedy (with a much slower processor).
That last idea might be one for the ePub reader, too. It's hard to stay engrossed in what you're reading if you can't "flow" smoothly from one page to the next.
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