[marketer]

About the speed issue - how is a 20 MB reader (Adobe Reader 9) plus the cost of downloading the entire pdf faster than a 200 kb swf file and having the document streamed? That makes no sense.

[axod]

Half of the "documents" seem to be either plain text, or a plain image (porn).

The most viewed "document" on scribd of all time: http://www.scribd.com/doc/26896/SUING-FOR-TOO-MUCH-SEX

Do you think it's sane to "stream" that document? What the hell are these people thinking??? They're wrapping plain text inside flash. One can only imagine their warped mentality. Why not convert plain text to a video, upload it to youtube, and embed the video. It'd make about as much sense.

[abstractbill]

This is the modern version of people emailing each other Microsoft Word documents with photos in them. I never understood that either.

[graemep]

That is because some corporate email systems block attached image files.

[axod]

Well, I'm glad it's scribd paying the bandwidth bill to "stream" a 200 byte text file via a 200k flash player, and not me :)

[jules]

Not a fair comparison: you need a viewer for swf files too. Downloading is not a problem. If it takes 0.3 s on scribd vs 0.8 s with pdf, then I'm willing to wait to have a viewer that allows me to scroll with my scrollwheel.

[marketer]

What browser do you use? Scrolling with the wheel works fine in Scribd, at least in Firefox.

Not to be pedantic, but the Adobe Flash Runtime is tiny compared to Acrobat or Word, and effectively has a 0 startup cost.

[jules]

Opera. Another reason why people shouldn't use Scribd: you have to register to download the pdf.