First off. I am not affiliated with iRiver. I am merely a happy owner. All too often those dissatisfied with their purchases are the more vocal, so I thought I would try to redress the balance (somewhat).
As to MacEachaidh's questions/responses:
I have many hundreds of pdf files, from various sources. Almost none were made by me.
In fact I specifically was holding off buying an ebook reader, until such a time as a device came along that could enable me to read most of my collection. Having tested a friend's iRiver Story, I decided enough was enough and settled on it.
I would say pdf files fall into 5 categories:
A) Totally reflowable. Breaks in page are readable. Lovely.
B) Non-reflowable but viewing the page horizontal is readable. Lovely.
C) Non-reflowable but zooming in vertical mode is readable. Lovely.
D) Non reflowable picture PDF. Often illegible. (made from scan, no OCR). Not great.
E) Doesn't load. Often too big.
So, for example I have a couple of computer manuals. For Latex and Ubuntu. They are a bit wide, but when viewed horizontal, they are perfectly legible. I have other books (like a scanned copy of Heidegger's Being and Time) which is viewable, but not amazingly legible. It certainly is readable though. Only very few of my books don't load or are totally illegible. And if I really want to read them, I have plenty of options to convert the file into something else.
EPUB is excellent. I downloaded Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species' from DarwinOnline and converted to an epub in calibre. Worked brilliantly. Just as good as the pdf version I had.
As for DOC files. I don't have Word, don't want Word and don't care to read Word docs on my device. But I would hardly call the steps I outlined impractical. Last week I did the steps a number of times and it took all of about 5 minutes to get a pdf which my gf called "amazing".
Personally, I have a netbook which allows me to read all my pdf files (and doc files for that matter) indoors. The iRiver is the perfect compliment to the netbook when I need to read outside (or in the conservatory). In that regards it is absolutely excellent.
Oh and comparing it to the Sony PRS-600 (my gf's model). She can zoom into pdf files, but she has to rezoom on every page. At least the iRiver remembers the setting!
I'm going back to reading my iRiver now.
