"I converted both my [pdf] book and my [pdf] copy of Objects on Rails to TXT files"<p>We need a terminal that can display graphics in place and still allow all the text tools to work exactly as they do today. I imagined reading a text-ized pdf, and having to bounce back and forth to the actual pdf to see the graphics, and that seems much more annoying to me than just reading the pdf.
This is why I love authoring content in Markdown (or Pandoc). I can send the nice formatted versions out to customers, while retaining Terminal friendly documents for myself.