D&D books available as eBooks?

[Thorin]

I was no DriveThruRpg.com and found the following:

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=28720&it=1&filters=300_2150_0

This is the D20 Modern core rulebook as a watermarked PDF ($39.95).  So I wondered if I could find the D&D books on there as well...

Player's Handbook II, Monster Manual II, others like that.  But not the three core books.  I've found all of the D20 Modern books, though, I think.

[Thorin]

Oh, and the Wizards books are fully text-searchable...

[Shayne]

Very Very Very cool.  No SWRPG though

[Shayne]

The review for the D&D 3.5 Players Handbook....

This is not a review of the content of the book (I find that to be very good). The problem is with the PDF. This is a 44mb file that you cannot extract pages from. The result is a file that you can barely even scroll through, let alone use. It takes forever to go from page to page. Forget trying to use this during a game. It will drive you nuts trying to read it in your free time. I've tried opening it on high end PCs and Macintosh computers with several gb of RAM, and the problem persists. This would be a great product if it were broken up into smaller files. Here's a hint, take the covers out of the main document!

Great book, lousy PDF. I found this PDF completely U-S-E-L-E-S-S.

Hmmm...we got SWRPG PDFs that are bigger then 80mb and are not exactly speedy but at the same time do work pretty well.

[Thorin]

Where'd you find the Players Handbook?  I couldn't get to it...

And yeah, these PDFs are way bigger than they need to be.  I've got a couple of PDFs of books that are only 5mb in size yet still have as many pages as the Players Handbook.  What do they do different?  Well, they clean 'em up better, I guess.

[Shayne]

Full text searching might add to the bulk?  I'm not entirely sure.

Oh wait, its a supplement.  *learn to read Shayne*.  "Whether you?re creating a new character or improving an existing one, the Player?s Handbook II supplement has something you need."  I thought the "2" ment like second version of 3.5 guide.  http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=28731&it=1

[Thorin]

No, it's the background graphics that they leave in that make the PDFs so big.  Compare Complete Arcane with Complete Divine - Complete Arcane has more white pages, less background images, and is a third the size.

[Lazybones]

PDFs are strange docs, it all depends how they are generated.

1. Full page images... both text and art are scanned from a paper document as one image, text indexes are then added so that the document is search able.
2. Mixed output from original source. Text is stored as text with full font information, images are compressed separately.. These tend to be much smaller PDFs.

Also what resolution and image compression they use makes a big difference. Later versions of the PDF spec support better compression.