I am in the exact same boat as you, ccarleton. I am a computer science graduate student and I want an e-book reader on which I can read not only books and novels but also conference and journal articles. While there is a lot of information available on these forums, it is a little intimidating for someone who is foraying into the e-reader world for the first time.
I also wholeheartedly second your screenshot request. I have found some screenshots on these forums in other posts but none in the manner that you suggest: academic articles displayed on the iliad (and other devices) with and without pre-processing. I think it would be very useful to see articles both in the single column (used for journals) and the two-column format (usually used for conferences and workshops). I can easily provide links to PDFs of both types to make it easier for any helpful soul to create the screenshots.
Single column pdf:
here
Two column pdf:
here
I hope that a fellow academic who has the same usage pattern as ours will help us out by posting the screenshots and provide some guidance.