Help from any PDF expert?

[ThoughtCriminal]

I have Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard and I'm trying to create a very large ebook. The ebook has over 1500 pages of scanned images which total up to just under 500 MB. THe PDF is created by importing HTML files that have pointers to the images (one HTML file per page).

I can build the PDF file, but unfortunately, it takes the reader about two minutes to load from a CD-R. Much too long for most users.

I've tried demos of several commercial utilities that split the PDF into smaller files, but despite claims by the developers none of them seem to preserve the bookmarks. I need the seperate PDF's to share the same bookmarks so the reader can jump to any page in the other PDF's. I think it is possible for a bookmark to point to a page in another PDF, but have not found a way to generate correct pointers.

I've considered dropping PDF in favor of a an HTML based eBook, but PDF has many features that I need (page rotation, zoom, search) and is a reasonably standard format.

Suggestions?