I have a DX that I use for just that purpose (reading journals and textbooks). Yes, the two column text runs a bit small, but I haven't had any problems. Check

I have a DX that I use for just that purpose (reading journals and textbooks). Yes, the two column text runs a bit small, but I haven't had any problems. Check to see how well it works for you. The DX crops out borders on good copies of journal articles (if it's a scanned image sometimes scanning artifacts cause it to miss correct margins). PDF speed has recently improved, though since the person above returned it just a bit ago, that was probably too slow for him. I was actually pleasantly surprised by the PDF speed. I find the speed to be consistent even with very large scanned-image PDF files (e.g. 300 page book with each page being an image, rather than vector text). Journal articles tend to flip pages only a tad slower than native ebooks. The most recent firmware version for the DX (2.5) has finally introduced PDF zooming and panning, which has worked for me pretty decently though I haven't had to use it much (once zoomed in to read fine print on a graph) Aaand that's been my experience.