It's hard to build a single device that suits all these use cases equally well. That's why I think in the long run all the big players are going to have to support multiple formats.
I completely agree with you. For something that would use Google currents, I can see myself using a 7-inch tablet. But I think it's going to be quite a while till everyone supports reflowable PDFs.
I don't see PDFs running away anytime soon, unless someone comes with a better format that can support print and screen simultaneously.
I use Latex, and with some tinkering you can render your documents to both PDF and epub. The problem would be with designers and people working with tools that are not as flexible as Latex.
I've found an even better solution for my LaTeX documents: I have several different sty files for different screen sizes. However, critically, they all generate PDFs. Why? Basically, it looks much better than an epub file (at least on my Kindle). The text is justified properly, it uses a nicer typeface and math looks great (actually, I have no idea of what math looks like in epub form).
Also, (once again Kindle-specific), epubs are bad for languages that are not English. Particularly, I'm thinking about Russian: I have some Russian books in epub and they look horrible. The problem is that words are never broken between two lines which leads to an absurdly jagged margin. Since Russian often has longer words than English, this is actually a big problem. I think something like TeX's automatic hyphenation would make the experience much better.
However, generating epub files also seems like it has merit. I'll have to try it some day. Is there some special tool that just extracts the content but not the style information, or do you have a special style for epub files? It would also be great if you could provide some relevant links.
