For me - with A4 PDF's The first thing I look at is the white space around the words ... if there is a lot, I'll trim off the white space so that the resulting document is reduced in size, but not by so much as to make it too hard to read.
The next thing that is OK, but not ideal for reading large documents, is to rotate the PDF - this means the size is fine, the fact you then get to read half a page at a time is a pain.
I also read a lot of scientific papers - most of which I have access to online. Rather than download the PDF - I often copy the text to a word processor then print to PDF formatted to the correct size - this works really well, but is time consuming.
I do all three of the above - for longer documents more effort is worth the while. It's not ideal, but for me it beats carrying around a huge pile of papers ... and i also get a couple of novels on the device at the same time ....
The battery issue: for me this isn't so much of an issue. I'm used to having chargers for trips of more than a couple of days - for 2 days I don't often read more than 5-6 hours a day, so it works OK for me.
I don't think I'd carry an A4 version easily in my own day to day activities ... also I have broken my screen once already - a larger size would likely be more fragile - I have to be more careful than I feel I should have to be currently with this size device ...
If you get a chance to try before you buy - this'd be worthwhile to see if such a device fits into your personal workflow ... unfortunately they aren't popular enough yet for the person in the next office to have one to lend you :-(
If you read a lot - eInk is quite good ...
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