Possible to Read Adventure Books Bought?

I bought the Phandelin books.   Is there a way to just read them normally?   And if so, how.

if they don't have it in the compendium then no, you need to load up the game and read it in game

In my experience, no, the WoTC adventures are not provided in PDF, so there is no way to read the adventure straight-through, page to page, cover to cover. All of the material (text and graphics) is in the Roll20 game that has it installed, but the info is spread out across Journals, Handouts, Character Sheets (2-3 tabs), Rollable Tables, map Pages (several Layers), and Compendium.  Roll20's Compendium is very difficult (probably impossible) to navigate in a sequential page-to-next-page way, from what I've found, trying it.   As a GM your best way to learn these types of Modules from a Roll20 purchase is, read all items under Journals tab in your roll20 game of it.  OR, please check out non-WoTC modules because many other publishers provide a PDF of their adventure along with the Roll20 Marketplace product sale, and on those, YES, you can simply read the adventure normally. 

Thanks for the info.  This is incredibly ridiculous in my opinion. 

Books from the compendium can generally be ready sequentially, with some caveats. They are built to be used within the context of the VTT, so things like spells, monsters and items are typically broken out into their own blobs (drag and drop bundles which are displayed as individual pages or entries) for integration with the VTT. Thus there's no "read-through" experience for those things. That would be great for reading, but destroy their VTT utility. If it is an adventure module that was converted by Roll20, each handout of the adventure text typically contains "Previous" and "Next" buttons to facilitate reading them. As for why no PDF, there are multiple possible reasons, depending on the project. PDFs handling is still clunky within Roll20, and many publishers (for example WotC), absolutely do not release PDFs of their main offerings. So in that latter case, it could be contractual.

I use outside sources to do this... 5etools etc... Because for some bizarre reason the price here on roll20 doesn't cover a simple PDF.  Not sure if it's because they want to drive traffic to this site for footfall or if it's a WotC thing. Probably the latter... Their monetisation is generally really shady.

The last sentence in the comment immediately before yours addresses this. And yes, as far as WOTC material, it's a WOTC thing. Final_Remains said: I use outside sources to do this... 5etools etc... Because for some bizarre reason the price here on roll20 doesn't cover a simple PDF.  Not sure if it's because they want to drive traffic to this site for footfall or if it's a WotC thing. Probably the latter... Their monetisation is generally really shady.

Rick A. said: The last sentence in the comment immediately before yours addresses this. And yes, as far as WOTC material, it's a WOTC thing. Final_Remains said: I use outside sources to do this... 5etools etc... Because for some bizarre reason the price here on roll20 doesn't cover a simple PDF.  Not sure if it's because they want to drive traffic to this site for footfall or if it's a WotC thing. Probably the latter... Their monetisation is generally really shady. Cool, good to know that my gut instinct was correct. Thanks for taking the time out of your day.