Jeff, it's great that you've joined the e-book crowd. Welcome!
I just read your blog entry on
"7 Reasons Not to Buy the Sony Reader". I wonder... have you've tried one of the hacks available at MobileRead to use the joystick for page navigation? That would fix your problem with the navigation buttons being on the "wrong" side. Also, while I agree that native PDF support lacks, have you actually tried one of the available rasterization tools? If not, I recommend you to try
this tool which does an excellent job bringing PDF content to your Reader.