what the kids at the jazz schools are doing nowadays is downloading scanned versions of all the old realbooks, as pdf ebooks. each ebook is about 50mb. every couple of months, the whole collection turns up on a different url, usually ending with .de or .dk or .zz or something. all of the common real books are available this way. if you don't feel like googling the moving target, you can just get them all off of kazaa.