Hey, being helpful is just one of the many services we offer around here.
What format you favor depends on what you're wanting. You can use RTF files straight off your hard-drive, if you don't mind them not displaying pix. You might want to bump the font size to ~16 points, as the RTF engine seems to display them a bit on the small side. Word or Wordpad (to name the most obvious ones) will do that for you in a snap. (ctrl+a to select the entire text and ctrl+shift+> to increase the font size of everything in steps).
Using something like BookDesigner to make LRF files (Sony's BBeB format, that is) has a lot of following for files that are meant to be used/read repeatedly. It has the advantages of displaying inline pix, as well as being about 2/3 the size of the same file in RTF.
PDF files really don't work well unless the 'page size' that they're created with is pretty close to the display size of the Reader -- it scales the pages to the Reader's screen size and A4/letter pages are usually all but completely unreadable that way.
There are a number of apps discussed around the forum for slicing and dicing PDFs to make them fit well on the screen, and for extracting the text from the PDF to a more ... flexible format.
The real problem with PDF is that it isn't a book format, it's a page layout format. It's designed specifically for the purpose of making sure a document prints exactly the same for you as it does for me, even if it goes around the planet several times in getting from one to the other. The only reason that people have tried to use it for books is that Adobe brilliantly offered its PDF reader app to the whole solar-system for free, which pretty much means that anyone anywhrere can open the files. Unfortunately, they also named it "Acrobat Reader" which makes book people think that it's good for reading stuff in, which isn't exactly the same in a book context.
It's possible that Adobe's Digital Editions will help with that situation, but we'll have to see what they end up doing.
I agree that easy is good if it gets you the same results as difficult. But sometimes easy is just easy, and it gets you something you don't like, where a bit less easy would get you something you love.
Unfortunately, due to the effect we call 'the tower of e-babel,' there are about two dozen significant e-book formats out there (and about three score less significant ones), which makes it difficult sometimes to even tell which file will work with what reader. Not a good or easy situation, but until a 'standard' e-book format is accepted by the world at large, it's one we pretty much have to deal with if we want to e-read.
