[Bob Russell]

One of the most common discussions about e-books centers around (non-protected) PDF files. Everyone generally tries to avoid them for e-book reading, or convert them into another format where possible with programs like PDFRead.

Sure there are many reflowable formats like txt, rtf, ePub and so forth. But when you want to read technical manuals or tutorials or scanned documents, what do you do?

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My solution so far has been a combination of several methods:
1) Read it on my Lenovo x61t tablet PC. This method never fails. I get color full-screen documents and lots of reading options. I can use Adobe Reader or FoxIt or whatever program I choose. And the tablet PC form factor means I can lay it on my lap and turn pages with the d-pad next to the screen. But it's heavy, gets warm, has limited battery life (maybe 4-6hrs), is tiring for the eyes, and requires me to carry around a very expensive computer just to read the documents.
2) Convert the pdf file using one of the many pdf document processors. I use PDFRead, but there are others. One of the new ones for Python folks even uses a fancy algorithm for splitting lines in the middle where there is white space between words. My method is simply to run the default PDFRead settings for my Sony Reader PRS-500, which results in each pdf page becoming two landscape Reader pages. I need glasses to read the resulting document, but it does get the job done reasonably well. This method is my solution when I want to read on the e-ink device, which is very convenient to carry around.
3) Extract the text from the pdf file and load it up on my favorite e-book reader. The problem with this is that text doesn't come out of scanned documents, and the text doesn't seem to come out nicely even for text-based documents. I've gotten to the point that I don't even try this most of the time. On the other hand, it has the advantage of getting the document onto my Treo smartphone, so it's always with me.