[briansmith]

On what kind of system is iPaper better than Adobe Reader 9?

Adobe Reader used to be really slow. But, even on my almost-three-year-old laptop, Adobe Reader 9 if quick.

I honestly don't know why Scribd doesn't do something to improve their product when obviously so many people hate it. Scribd is one of the very, very few things about my computer that still frustrates me.

[marketer]

In general iPaper does a good job for smaller documents (press releases, etc.) that you just want to skim. It sucks for very complex documents, or for reading longer books online. It was never designed to be a replacement for Adobe Reader -- that would take years considering the pdf spec has the same magnitude of complexity as HTML/CSS.

Also I'm not sure what metric of 'quick' you use. The iPaper swf is around 150 kb, and the Adobe Reader binary is around 30 MB. Take a look at http://www.dearadobe.com/top_rated.php - most of the top five are related to Reader bloat.