I have no experience with this in particular but thinking on it I would
think the way to make the size more user friendly would be to make 300 dpi
display jpegs, possibly greyscale if without images, and stitch those
together into a pdf.  I imagine that would be decent sized off.  Now if you
wanted ocr that won't help but it should make the pdf much smaller.

Matt Sherman
On Feb 22, 2013 7:47 PM, "Wilhelmina Randtke" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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
> >