How to Do Everything With PDFs: various free programs for editing & converting PDFs. (I got the link a few weeks ago from TadW
right here.) While most of these are more easily done with Acrobat Pro, not everyone has Acrobat Pro.
Missing from the list: PDF to Word converters.
Hellopdf, several online sources that require loading your PDF to a website,
freewaregenius entry comparing various methods.
Convert from Word to RTF (for those who don't have Microsoft Office):
AbiWord is a free, small word processing program that opens Word docs (among others) and can convert them to (i.e. "save as") to many standard word processing filetypes. It'll also run
portable, from a flash drive.
About badly formatted books: No, there's nothing that can be done with them short of "convert & proofread." (Or, if you're particularly talented with PDFs and you like headaches, you can do the fixes there. But not even PDF fanatics use Acrobat for serious proofing and correcting.) If you can find patterns in the errors, you might be able to use find/replace functions to fix them, but you probably can't use "replace all" for most errors.