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OK I have been testing this week with the option
compress_news_images = True
This has dramatically reduced the average size of the NYT subscription recipe issues from 5-13 MB in the previous 2 weeks to < 5 MB this week. For some reason the size of last Sunday's issue dropped the most to 2.7MB. I was suspicious - I did not do an A/B test - but the content seems to be intact. Navigation and page turning on the Kindle Keyboard and Paperwhite is also noticeably faster. Better yet, there have been no Kindle crashes.
On my PC's 24-in monitor, using a Mobi to epub conversion with Firefox, the photos are somewhat blocky but reasonably detailed. The text in some charts was readable but marginal. I gather that using another Calibre device profile in this case, rather than a conversion, may have improved image quality, but even this approach was acceptable to me.
I also tried the compression option with a custom Ars Technica recipe and had similar size reductions.
For the NYT, at least, it probably makes sense to set "compress_news_images = True" as the default option.
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