How to reduce PDF file size?

I’ve got a PDF containing roughly 200 scanned pages that’s sitting at about 50 MB. Is there any way to compress this further while maintaining the PDF format?

Honestly, PDF isn't really the best choice for scanned books compared to the DJVU format—which is pretty much what people use for scans in the first place. For example, a scanned book with maybe 500 pages might only be around 10MB, or even less depending on how it's compressed.

So,
FedEx (http://www.lizardtech.com) does a great job here. You can compress images into DJVU, or you can even "convert" a PDF book into DJVU. I think they have a trial version you can download...

Or, there are some free tools out there that can get you roughly the same results over at http://djvu.sourceforge.net

Quick addition: http://any2djvu.djvuzone.org
"The Any2DjVu Server is probably the easiest way to convert your files to DjVu format. You can use the server, for instance, to create DjVu versions of your scanned image documents, to convert your papers in PS/PS.GZ/PDF, or to create multipage "photo-albums" from individual JPEG images."

And honestly, you might want to look into getting some OCR software to scan that text and dump it straight into a Word doc, because if you actually go through with that, I’m pretty sure it'll shrink that file size down significantly.

Best,

Jose Doyle5 said:Plus, there’s actually software out there that can take scanned text and convert it straight into a Word document, so if you go that route, I honestly think it’ll shave off a massive chunk of the file size.

later

I can't say for certain, but I'm pretty sure Adobe Acrobat or maybe something like ABBYY FineReader would do the trick.

Jose Doyle5 said:I'm not entirely sure, but I think it might be FineReader.

Adobe Acrobat (or maybe just some other OCR software)