Welcome to MobileRead, europas_ice!
Yeah, the PDF page turns are a lot slower with embedded fonts, but PDFs are also just slower than some other formats.
Since it sounds like you're making the files yourself, you might want to try
BookDesigner to make LRF files (the Reader's 'native' format), there's a lot of supporting info around here for it, and even though it's a 'closed' format, BD lets you save the formatted source and convert it to a fair number of other formats so you don't really lose your work that way.
Just a suggestion, take it for what it's worth to you.
