How do I create my own eBook?

Question

I have many documents from school that I'd like to scan, convert to PDFs and then compile together into one PDF file. The problem is that whenever I scan a document, I can't compress it down enough without sacrificing quality, so I can't have a small PDF file. I have a few eBooks, and, looking at their properties, somehow the creators of those eBooks were able to compress their PDFs down enough without sacrificing any quality to the documents whatsoever. Here's an example:
one eBook that I have is 696 pages, the filesize is 4,159,863 bytes, and it looks like it was simply scanned and put together, because the quality of the eBook matches the book that it came from (which I happen to own). True, the images in the eBook are black and white (some of the images in the book are in colour), but there is no noticeable depreciation in their quality. Whoever created it was using the application PScript5.dll version 5.2, the PDF producer Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 (Windows), the PDF version is 1.5 (Acrobat 6.x), and was NOT optimized for fast web view. How did the author get the page size so small (kb wise) yet retain quality? If one were to do the math: 4,159,863 bytes divided by 696 pages equals 5976.81, then divided by 1000 equals 5.97681. Almost 6 kb per page? How is that possible?
The smallest I could compress scanned images was about 20 kb, and the quality was terrible. In fact, the only way I could shrink them to that size was to scan them in Black and white (1 bit), and then distill them as much as I dared. The vast majority of documents that I'm scanning are black and white text with very little in the way of graphics.
Here are the programs that I have at my disposal:
Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 and HP Director (for scanning with my HP PSC 1210 all-in-one printer, which has OCR technology)
Microsoft Word 2000 (9.0.2720)
Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5 (10/26/01) (yes, it has paper capture)
Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5.2001101100
It is driving me absolutely crazy that I cannot figure this out. Even creating my own job option in Distiller and adjusting the settings didn't help.
It should be possible, with the programs that I have, to get the results I want. For those of you who believe I should upgrade to something beyond Adobe Acrobat 5, here's another example for you:
There used to be a link on www.iartonline.ca (which no longer exists) to a PDF that is 13 pages long, created with the application Microsoft Word 8.0, the PDF producer is Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Windows, the PDF version is 1.2 (Acrobat 3.x) and has a file size of 79,719 bytes. In contrast, I scanned two school documents (using OCR) into Microsoft Word, corrected any errors, and converted it to an Adobe PDF from there. The resulting size (for TWO PAGES) was 25 kb.
So, in conclusion, it HAS to be possible for me to scan my documents, retain their quality while compressing their size, and compiling them into single file PDFs.
I apologize for the lengthy explanation (this is why I couldn't ask the question on WikiAnswers), but hopefully this will save others interested in answering from asking irrelevant (to me) questions.
Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

I don't understand why this question hasn't been answered yet. Am I not explaining it in clear enough terms or in plain enough English?
Since it seems to be such a big question to answer, I'll break it down:
Once I have scanned an image, how do I convert that image into a small PDF?
An example of what I mean: if I scan one sheet of paper...let's say it's a sheet of band music, meaning some text & mostly graphics in black and white...what settings would I use to convert that scanned image (that 'scanned image' could be in bitmap, jpg or just about any other kind of image file format) into a small PDF file? By 'small', I mean 20 kb or less (1 sheet of black and white text & graphics is DEFINITELY capable of being compressed down to that size with little to no loss of visual quality). I've messed around with various settings in Acrobat Distiller 5 AND 6, and the resulting PDFs have been WAY too big (100, 200, some even 400 kb). I've even done a scan of a sheet of band music, saved it as a jpg (82 kb), tried to open that jpg file in Acrobat 5, and received the message, "insufficient data for an image". Absolutely impossible, but it happened anyway. I've been able to open jpg files in Acrobat that were HALF that size and been able to save them as PDFs (of course, the quality was almost completely gone by that point).
It's 2010. There are people out there who have been able to scan & save images as small PDFs (under 100 kb per sheet while retaining the quality of the scanned image) since at LEAST 2001. I fully believe that it's possible with the programs I have to accomplish such a goal, but I've exhausted almost every possible combination I can think of when it comes to scanning and Distiller settings.
Once again, here's what I have at my disposal...
An HP PSC 1210 All-in-one printer (has OCR technology)
Adobe Acrobat 5.0.5
Distiller 5 and Distiller 6
HP Director (a program for scanning and setting scanning parameters)
Jasc Paint shop pro 8 (also for scanning)
There's definitely someone out there who knows how to do this. Mods?