Compare e.g. the tile page of https://archive.org/details/bohemiaunderhaps00capeiala/mode/2up with the title page of the uploaded file https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Bohemia_under_Hapsburg_misrule_%281915%29.pdf (or any other pages of the same files)
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The degradation is not due to IA-Upload, it's the Internet Archive's own heavy compression (~90MB of original images becomes 6,5MB of PDF) during PDF generation that causes this. The PDF from the IA is the same: https://archive.org/download/bohemiaunderhaps00capeiala/bohemiaunderhaps00capeiala.pdf
The scan pages you see at the IA are JPEGs generated directly from the JP2 scan photos, so they look a lot better in the IA "book reader" mode.
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I guess we could look at generating a new PDF; is that worth it? It seems a similar better-quality file could be achieved by using DjVu.