Since most of the documents we need to display are already hosted on the web, we opted to use an embedded web view that opens the document using google docs viewer.
We still have a few locally stored documents though that this approach doesn’t work with. For these, our solution was to rely on the support of existing apps. After spending some more time with Android, It seems that most devices come equipped with some sort of document/pdf reading capability installed fresh out of the box. In the event that they don’t have a capable app, we direct them to a market search for a free reader.