On Sun, 1 Jun 2014, James Adcock wrote:
One can find plenty of awful page image books too -- page images containing images which require a great deal of digital image manipulation to get them to a "readable" [or viewable] state.
Yes, you can find them. (Even otherwise good archive.org page image books are typically in .jp2 format and cannot be read without a conversion that takes minutes even on a fast machine.) And awful as they are, they're still better. At least you can do *something* to be able to read them with good images, even if it is a lot of work. Doing excess work to get something is pretty awful--but it still beats not being able to get it at all.
[I know I am reluctant to submit books over 10 meg in size -- due to downloading speed/cost issues for e-book readers on slow cellphone connections.]
You gave the solution yourself: have a way to download books with images of various sizes. If you submit the book using large images, that can be converted to a book with small images. If you submit a book with small images, that *cannot* be converted to a book with large images, because by only submitting it using small images, you've thrown away information that cannot be recreated. Even if only a portion of the audience is helped by large images, the fact that image size conversion is one way makes it very suboptimal to make them permanently small. Furthermore, although you argue that small images are a necessary tradeoff, that matches up with PG rules only by coincidence. PG merely says that the submitter should use small images, not as part of a tradeoff, but because the rules were written long ago and nobody changed them.