Whats the biggest file that can be downloaded on a dialup connection

[echnidna]

Some of my ebooks now range from 20 to 70 MB which I think is impractical for a dialup connection being able to download them.

Over 20% of people are on dialup connections.

Whats the biggest file a dialup can reliably download?

Any workarounds or is it stickit onna cd and mail it?

[jchappo]

I have successfully downloaded a file over 500Mb using dial-up (astronomical catalogue).

It took me several weeks using Flashget which can resume stopped downloads - so yes, stick it on a CD

John

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

If you do end up going into CD's, it might be worth your while to look at sourcing some mini- & credit-card CD's. Not as cheap as std. size, but with appropriate printing certainly a good way to quickly distinguish between your "product" and any of the million other CD's most of us seem to have scattered around the place.

A lot easier to slip into a std. sized envelope for mailing, too...

[Ramps]

Haven't been on dial-up for a few years but when I was and was really keen I'd use a download manager as per John (above). But mostly I find most people run out of patience when they see things of 5Mb ( some people can't be bothered at about 2Mb) but most (not all) of the dial up accounts have a fairly restricted download limit anyway so the users mat not be interested. I am not ignoring the folks that are too "remote" from an updated exchange to get ADSL etc but would still like to have access to the world ... they'd still be very interested and prob have a significant download capacity.

[Ianab]

On dialup about the best you can hope for is 15mb an hour, so yeah, the 20mb+ files are problematic. A download manager will help as it lets you resume the file partway if you get disconnected, but it still ties up the phone line for a LONG time.
The CDR / snail mail option may be the best one for some folks Especially if you can burn several files to one disk = more sales and less postage.

Ian

[echnidna]

Thanks people.
Think I'll put the cd option on my website.

[sbranden]

Another option might be to look at compressing the file via zip, rar, bzip or similar. The result will depend on the type of file, but should result in something smaller.

shaun

[ian]

Some of my ebooks now range from 20 to 70 MB which I think is impractical for a dialup connection being able to download them.

Over 20% of people are on dialup connections.

Whats the biggest file a dialup can reliably download?

Any workarounds or is it stickit onna cd and mail it?

we've had a discussion about this at work. On our INTRAnet documents larger than 5Mb are zipped (though zipping is pointless with a PDF file). On the INTERnet there are few if any documents larger than 1Mb and a typical 'big' file is 500kb.
If you want an example of electronic delivery trawl around the specification area of the RTA web site http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/doingbusin...ons/index.html

Work arounds.
How are you generating your ebooks?
If you're using a "proper" authoring program, there should be an option to reduce the file size to something suitable for viewing on screen and transmitting over the 'net.
I've successfully reduced a 33Mb PDF to about 1Mb using the "reduce file size" comand in Adobe PDF Writer. It mainly acts to reduce the size of the graphics. All you need for on-screen viewing is 72dpi, most printers are quite happy printing images sampled at 100dpi, but a commercial printer usually requires 1200dpi. In Adobe, the default image resolution seems to be 300dpi. You can tweak the settings for image compression and sampling when you generate the file.

The largest PDF I've got contains about 1700 pages of text, and 200 A3 maps (at screen resolution) and runs to about 85Mb
The largest PDF I've come across so far was about 580Mb representing about 500 pages


ian

Edited to remove the stuff left in 'cause I was in a hurry the first time and to add a bit more info