NYT Electronic Edition
Since I’m in Cleveland now and am not spending much time on the subway, I decided to try out the NY Times electronic edition, basically to be read on the computer in the mornings.
So far, it looks good. You have to download and install a special reader (probably for Digital Rights Management reasons), but everything is readable and you can browse pretty easily. I think I wound up looking more closely at the Times than I have in a while, because you don’t flip through as quickly as you would with the paper on, say, the subway. The paper can be displayed so that an entire page fills the screen (not so useful, as my monitor isn’t big enough) or so that the screen width is filled (the normal mode). One of those old “portrait” dimension monitors would be nice, but not necessary: a screen driven at 1280×1024 is more than sufficient. One thing to note is that the B&W images look pixelated, so they’re not storing the full image for these, but the color images look fine. I don’t see an obvious way to download the full image, though. This may not matter that much, because most of the images are from advertisements, and any one you want to look at more closely can probably be found on the NYT website somewhere.
The Newsstand reader has word search and can skip around to different sections. There’s a usability issue in terms of not jumping back to the page you can from, if you’re following a link, so it’s not completely browser-like. This isn’t that bad with the Times, because the newspaper doesn’t really do that much page jumping after the first page of a section, and with the section navigation facility, you can also go to the start of a section. I haven’t tried the word search yet. There are also other untried functions, like mailing a copy off to a friend (not sure about how DRM is handled in this case) or printing a page. So far, it hasn’t been necessary.
The main plus for me is that it’s a full Metro-edition NYT, so I can get read the local New York City news. All the ads are there, for that matter, including the Special Advertising Sections they have every once in a while. Large sections of classifieds or stock quotes can be skipped over.
The cost is $150/year for a full year subscription, so it’s about $0.40/day, including the Sunday edition and Magazine. I’m not sure how the Sunday section will look yet: will it including all the relatively-useles-for-me ad blow-ins?
Update: It looks pretty good on a 1024×768 laptop screen, too. The reader apparently scales pretty well. There’s also amusing DRM stuff going on: if you run a program that might have screen capture capability (inadvertantly, as I was using Irfanview to prep the various photos I posted today), the reader hides itself from view while putting up a warning telling you to turn the capture program off.