As a developer, it bothers me when someone sends me a large pdf file compared to the number of pages. Recently, I recieved a 12MB scanned document for just one letter-sized page... so I got to googlin, like I usually do, and found ghostscript!
to learn more abot ghostscript (gs): https://www.ghostscript.com/
What we are interested in, is the gs command line tool, which provides many options for manipulating PDF, but we are interested in compressign those large PDF's into small yet legible documents.
credit goes to this answer on askubuntu forum: https://askubuntu.com/questions/3382/reduce-filesize-of-a-scanned-pdf/3387#3387?newreg=bceddef8bc334e5b88bbfd17a6e7c4f9
