In my experience, which is admittedly not deep, I find RasterRarian to be an excellent tool for converting PDF files, when something I can't find anywhere else in any other form is only available in PDF format.
Another terrific tool is Web2Book which can convert many (but not all) web pages into .lrf format.
Another terrific resource for getting books onto the reader is the vast library at Project Gutenberg. You can download for free any books out of their 20,000 already scanned and converted to .txt files or available with illustrations as html files (web2book works wonderfully with these illustrated html files!). The only problem with the PG books is that each line ends with a hard-return, with an extra hard-return to separate paragraphs. For people who have Word on their computers, they can run the macro which is discussed in the wiki on conversions in this forum. But for people who don't have Word, or who don't want to convert from within Word for any reason, there is a wonderful utility found at the librie group at groups.yahoo.com -- it's the librie_text_assistant and is found in the Files section in the Content Generation folder. It will very quickly and easily remove the extra hard-returns from each line, leaving the double hard-returns for paragraph separation. On older PG files, with the lengthy legalese at the start of each file, it also offers to strip out the PG legalese.
There are lots of ways to get terrific content onto the Reader without paying a penny! And we haven't even begun to point out the wonderful work being done by members of this forum, converting books into .lrf files with tables of contents and lots of great features!
As for lighting the reader, I've found that I can ready it very well in any situation where I would normally be able to read a paperback. That means that it needs a booklight some of the time. There are threads in the Accessories subforum on which book lights are best, but I've found the Z-light to be very good and it packs up quite flat and conveniently when not in use.
But I am intrigued by the new Mighty-Bright lights with the double-antennae LEDs. I may buy one of those this week and see which I prefer.
And don't hesitate to ask lots of questions -- this is a terrific bunch of people on this forum!
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