I’ve been down this road before, e.g. BHL, DjVu, and reading the f*cking manual and Demo of full-text indexing of BHL using CouchDB hosted by Cloudant, but I’m revisiting converting BHL page scans to black and white images, partly to clean them up, to make them closer to what a modern reader might expect, and partly to reduce the size of the image. The latter means faster loading times and smaller PDFs for articles.