A Good File Size?

I'm helping a friend with a portfolio site, he is a writer and he wants to put a few links to PDF files of his writing(scanned from magazines). Anybody have any thoughts on what is an acceptable file size for downloading? Right now the PDFs seem to be in the 25MB range and are decent quality.

That's way too big. Put a low res scanned image of the layout, and link it to a page with the text.

How are you making the PDFs? Most applications 'to PDF' will have a feature that creates the PDF file Web use which will incorporate some compression.

I'm not the one scanning but he's been just scanning the pages of the magazine using a high DPI then reducing the size in photoshop, then saving them as PDF files. Everytime I try to reduce the file size, I lose the quality/legibility he's looking for. The articles are in an artsy type magazine so there are some big images that I'd prefer to leave crisp if possible.

If I posted a link to a pdf would anyone mind taking a look?

Post a link, I'll see if I can find a happy medium.

http://www.ragetards.com/morningbreath.pdf

Ignore the URL... :shhh:

Here's a version I got down to about 800k. I had to OCR the text and round trip it through Illustrator before saving a down sampled version. The OCR is about 98% accurate. Let me know if this works for ya.

http://stranskydesign.com/_uploads/morningbreath2.pdf

The file size is awesome! Only problem is I think he really wants to retain the way it(the text) looks in the magazine... Anyone have any ideas how that could be done? I'm like 99% sure this PDF is able to lose some of its file size without losing too much quality =/

But thanks for the effort~!

Yeah I didn't spend any time reformatting the text to look the same. The point was to show it could be done. Since the entire page is one scan, any reduction in image quality is going to hurt the legibility of the text. You can try different compression settings until you find that the text is just legible enough but you won't find a value that takes more than a couple megs off the file size going that route.