How do I reduce a 185,000 KB PDF (exported from InDesign) to something that can be easily shared for print and Web use?

First, I would strongly recommend that you create at least two documents:

• One press ready PDF of your entire book to accommodate commercial printing. You don’t need to worry about the size of this file. You can get more information about how to do that by following this link.
• And a different PDF set targeted for web use. These files will be optimized for better reproduction and distribution within your website.

Do you have a Table of Contents for your InDesign document? Have you created it from multiple smaller InDesign documents using InDesign’s book functions? If you have, you’ve already started what you need to do to break down your big document into smaller, bite-sized documents that will be far more web-friendly than a 250-page book.

Rather than relying on your document’s internal Table of Contents or InDesign list of Book files, break your large InDesign document down into subdivided, smaller PDFs accessed through an external Table of Contents that tie to those smaller documents through a list of associated weblinks. 250 pages is a lot to download or serve up to view on the web. But if you can break that down into 20-30 smaller chunks, downloading or serving for view is a lot easier. As far as web settings go, you can learn a lot more about setting up PDFs for web use by following this link.

Hope this helps,

Randy