I often find myself reading PDF material on my Kindle, and I think I found some pretty decent workarounds. My three workarounds are:

• If possible, try to find an epub or mobi version. For the more obscure, technical stuff, this is impossible, but for the more popular stuff, this is doable.

• Try to use calibre to convert the PDF to a mobi. For some PDFs, this comes out with a good quality mobi, but often the PDF is formatted so that it does not.

• But what often end up doing is a lot simpler: I turn the screen rotation sideways. Rather than the height of the Kindle being the height of the page, if it is the width of the page, you actually get a decent view. The width of the e-book reader becomes the height of the part of the page you can see, but thats what scrolling is for.

The third option works so well that I often don't bother with the first two, but all three are on the table for when I find a PDF I want to read.