so I did email Nintendo to see if they would be nice enough to offer up the Iwata Asks columns as documents of some sort and they got back to me within two days, which was nice. however their answer was simply we do not offer the Iwata Asks columns in a downloadable format. but the person did document my comment for sharing with other departments. I'm glad he did that much but I'm not expecting big results..
so it does seem that if I want to read these columns on my Kobo then I will have to take care of it manually. I really was hoping to avoid the pdf route because I think my Kobo displays simple txt documents much, much nicer than it does pdf's but it also occurs to me that simply printing to pdf as nickmitch and BlackNMild2k1 suggesting will probably be less time consuming (but it will still consume much time..) so that's probably what I'll do however I do have one refinement to offer up. sourceforge.com hosts this app called PDFCreator here
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ that allows Windows to do what the Mac (and Ubuntu) already can do, print to PDF. I wanted to mention that option because people without macs could use it and also I've always averse to using online converters wherever it's convenient..
thanks to everyone who offered help :-)