Large, un-bolded font
Admit it, the Palm default text can be small, and if you read in bed at night, your eyes may be tired, and you may want larger characters. My middle-aged eyes need all the help they can get. Some of these readers only give you three font choices, but most give you four, adding a large, un-bolded font that's easy on the eyes.

Bookmarking
Bookmarks flag places in the text. Just about all document readers return you to where you left off; bookmarks are for marking passages you want to re-read, quote from, or show someone else later. When you select Add Bookmark, a dialog box opens up so you can enter some words of description.

A useful approach is something I call "grab-it" bookmarking, i.e., it takes words from the page (typically from the top line or words you've highlighted). This is great at night because it spares you the struggle of blindly entering Graffiti in darkness! Ideally, the grabbed text should be highlighted--ready to be replaced--so you could enter your own description easily if desired.

Also on the subject of bookmarks, pop-up or pull-down lists of the bookmarks you've created are useful, as you shouldn't have to go through a separate dialog box to find the place you're looking for.

Text selection and copying
Text selection and copying is useful for copying quotes or passages or for selecting text for a bookmark. The best readers allow you to drag the stylus in order to select text. QED (at http://visionary2000.com/qed/) is the only reader I know of that can drag-copy while still allowing screen taps to advance the text. In place of that, a single tap should turn on copy mode. At the moment, only QuickWord (at http://www.cesinc.com/quickword/index.html) and WordSmith (at http://www.bluenomad.com/ws/prod_wordsmith_details.html) have that. Alas, other readers require many taps to enable copying.

Tapping to advance
Typically, a tap in the bottom half of the text window advances a page, and a tap in the top half retreats. MobiPocket uses the left and right sides. It's a nuisance at first, but one adapts fairly quickly. Nearly all document readers allow you to turn off line-overlap so you shouldn't have to re-read a line.

Rapid font change
In most of these types of programs, font changes are fast, almost immediate. In some, it takes much too long and can even result in bloated file sizes.

Speedy find
What's the point of a find feature if you have to wait a long time to get the information you want? It's embarrassing to proclaim, "I have that info on my Palm device," and then sit around while the reader takes forever to find it.

Graceful use of documents
A reader shouldn't delete public documents when you delete the reader application itself. The prime culprit is AportisDoc in either its free or pay version. One solution is to install TealDoc (at http://www.tealpoint.com/softdoc.htm), transfer all your documents to TealDoc format, delete the offending application, and then transfer them all back to public format.