I'm quite happy with simple PDFs and a laptop or at home on my desktop. I don't know what PDF readers you're using, but at least Okular has bookmarks, notes, markings, underlinings, highlights... Dog-earings and other book mutilations are so primitive! Index searches aren't as useful anymore, I love ctrl+F. :P
I find PDF search for tech books almost wholly useless, whereas the index does a really good job. I guess it's because it has that human touch to give a high relevancy score shrug
Well, depending on the PDF some have hard links in the index, table of contents, etc., so that balances out any problems of ctrl+F and saves the step of thumbing to the page or entering the page number and pressing enter... I'll admit for me the fastest way of finding stuff is usually through the table of contents. Even so I still can't think of a case where PDF search absolutely failed me and I could only find what I was looking for in the index or ToC, and my primary reading materials are tech and math and science... For the fiction I read it's superb for finding quotes or dialog if I can't remember a general area in the book where it was (which is frequent, especially if I hadn't read it for months). Looks like Okular doesn't have regex search though, too bad.
