I am looking for the best way to host a large manual online and allow the public to browse different sections, as well as individual figures and tables. It is already in a digital format. I also need to be able to cross-reference between different parts of the document with active links for keywords.
Any ideas?
I recommend http://www.similarsites.com/ or Scribd as mentioned previously.
Regards,
JackCola.org
I suggest a good starting point might be http://www.scribd.com/
If that's not what you need then...
You need to be more precise about "large" and "digital format".
You also need to think about popularity and budget. That's to say a very large document that might prove seriously popular could cost whoever was hosting it a lot (unlikely).
Possible solutions might be to turn it into web pages or PDF format.
As regards "cross links and keywords" - if it's digital format don't forget that CTRL-F pops up a "Find" search box in many digital formats/products (e.g. web page, MS Word document, Adobe PDF). Other than that inserting links can be a tedious manual process - you might find a tool to automate it but then you'd lose some control over link quality.
Try scribd.com.
What do you want to do? File hosting or web hosting? I would recommend you to incorporate all the features you want in the file itself, probably as a PDF and then do a file hosting, with shared link to download. Then you can file host in any of these free services : http://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.com/web-hosting-shopping/file-storage-hosting/
There are also out file hosting services too and most provide 5GB free storage.
Is Scribd what you want?: http://www.scribd.com/.