I had this problem last year.

I did PDF.  There are about no studies on PDF size and usability.  What I
did is go to gray scale for text pages to knock down file size, played with
optimizing, and broke super long (think 3K page book) files in smaller
chunks.

It does not make for a pleasant browsing experience, but files load in a
timely manner even on a poor connection, and files are not large enough to
be cumbersome.  I also had absolutely no IT infrastructure where I was at,
so prepared and prepped PDFs in static file storage were my only option.
If you have a CMS that will deliver pages, like maybe current page and
preload next 5, or something like that, then you have many more options for
a good user experience.

When I looked at other big long books online, I found they tended to use
300 dpi gray scale or 600 dpi black and white.  I just looked at government
documents, because that's what I worked with.

-Wilhelmina Randtke

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 6:50 PM, Kyle Banerjee <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> We have a few digitized books, (some of them are old -- we're talking 500
> years). Sizes are all over the place but the big ones are easily the size
> of a large briefcase.
>
> We want to make these works more accessible/usable and there's some demand
> to make them available for tablets. What experience do people have with
> stuff like that, and what software/services/methods do you recommend?
>
> Source files are 600 dpi uncompressed tiffs so they're pretty big and
> there's nothing special about a book being over 10GB in size. Thanks,
>
> kyle
>