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by viraptor 5835 days ago
Depends on a site, but taking MU and going point by point:

- first - wait timers: Megaupload has a timer which takes ~1min. to count down - that's quicker for me than dealing with scribd's registration.

- second - ads: I haven't noticed, I use adblock and never seen an ad on Megaupload. Not sure what's the current status of Scribd, but disabling scripts brought out a lot of spam words years ago (maybe they don't use it anymore), so annoyance is pretty much the same (or isn't there, depending on your view)

- third - unicode: We're talking about pdf-s. They have their own tags, for example for the title which makes the name pretty much irrelevant. Unless you're downloading a book with "Author - Title.pdf" name, you're most likely going to run into "some_serial_number", "ModelNumberDescription_code" for manuals, "thesis.pdf" or some other internal convention. Actually zipping the file allows you to see the original one.

- fourth - limits: Megaupload has none that I know of and I get >200kB/s most of the times.

So it might be very subjective, but even considering all the crap download pages give us, I'd take a Megaupload-ed .pdf over Scribd any time.

+ After writing this, I got back to scribd and tried to download something - it's MUCH better than it was before. I only had to scroll through 2 pages and find a small link at the bottom and it opened a new window. Right now, for me it's only as bad as MU.