Another historian here (We're a clique!) and, yeah, I'm not a big fan of PDFs. Mind you, I've worked on one already (Street Legends: Home Edition ... it's free! You know you want it!), but when possible, I'll pick a book every time.
That said, there *are* print on demand services (Tho I don't know how they work exactly with Shadowrun PDFs.Hrm. I should find that out.) and, of course, you can always fire up the ol' home printer and get to tabulating.
CanRay, for instance, rather famously printed out Shadowrun 2050 and made himself an oldschool 3-ring binder book out of it. That was tres keen!
So, yeah, I get why the PDF-only stuff isn't your bag, but it never hurts to give 'em a try.
(But you can have my bookshelf when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.)