The Failings of Adobe Reader for PalmOS

I recently bought a new Palm Tungsten T5 PDA and have transferred over all the information from my old Palm Zire 71. I had a number of unencrypted Adobe PDF ebooks on the old device that were transferred to the new one. Sounds good so far but here is the score for this morning:

1. Adobe Reader for Palm refused to open any of the old ebooks. It did not tel me why only that it could not. None of these were encrypted (DRM) ebooks.
2. Tried to convert new Books. I had a couple of PDF novels given to me as freebies by the publisher. Tried to convert them for reading on the PDA but this failed. The Adobe desktop client just could not convert them. What that means is I will probably never read those books nor will I buy any ebooks (they only publish in PDF) from that publisher.
3. Failed conversion of another PDF ebook. This was an unencrypted ebook from a different publisher I had bought some time ago. The conversion process for a 300 page book took over 20 minutes on a 2.0 Ghz, G5 iMac, despite the time it appeared to go smoothly. When I opened up the ebook on the Palm I had garbage. Strike 3 Adobe Acrobat.

The end result is, that for pleasure reading, I no longer trust buying PDF ebook in the vain hope that I might be able to convert them to read on my handheld. Now I do not mind PDF for tech manuals, or role playing game manuals, because I expect to read those on my computer or print them out. But for pleasure reading, a PDF document has to be readable on my Palm PDA because that is my preferred reading device otherwise I just am not going to buy it or read it. I think it really highlights the problem for publishers that only offer an ebook in PDF format. They need to offer that same ebook in at least one other cross platform format such as Mobipocket or Palm.DOC.