Jon Anderson writes:

My interest in the Amazon Kindle went up greatly when I read it will
hold up to 3500 ebooks. Now I'm not sure yet how many it'll hold in PDF
format,

I just got the $139 Kindle 3 to play with.

Let me just start by saying that the PDF 28th Machinery's Handbook works
very well on this thing. That alone would justify it as a shop tool.
You can fit the pages to the screen and read them with your magnifier
headset. This book is not otherwise available as an ebook.

My other justification was I could flop on the couch and read all those
500-page software manuals in PDF format such as one finds on e.b.e-
ebook.technical, without having to print them out or perch a hot-heavy-
corded laptop on my abdomen. Copying the actual PDF files is easy, as
the device plugs into USB as an ordinary simple storage device.

Some PDFs are quite suitable, such as small-format books that were
scanned as bitmaps. These work almost like a native ebook format, the
pages fitting nicely into the screen size.

Larger formats like magazines and the Osprey military books, in PDF, are
readable, but kind of clumsy with the keyhole effect of the 600x800
display. What works best is to rotate the view into landscape mode,
which can fit the page to the width of the screen.