Tablets and newspapers

Good choices. I suggest you add The Atlantic to your considerations...

 

Well, I guess, considering your starting point was $110/month in newspaper subscriptions. Good for you to see the same enjoyment at almost half the price.

I don't have a single monthly bill that crosses the $110 threshold.

 

First generation Kindle Fire -- $159.

The price will only continue to drop.

I have two newspaper subscriptions on my Kindle Fire, and I'd have more if more statewide papers had Kindle Fire editions. I love them, and they keep expanding the editions. I'm not familiar with NYT or other editions/apps from larger publications, but I imagine they're better. The possibilities of what could be done with a multimedia publication -- linking to videos, photo galleries, podcast reports/interviews etc -- are endless. And better yet, I'd think people would be much more likely to pay for a subscription to a digital edition for a tablet as opposed to a paywall on a website.

 

Dick Whitman, since you are concerned, I will cancel my print subscriptions if you send me a tablet.

 

Are you all reading the "e-editions" on your tablet, where PDFs of the print pages are available to flip through?

I've looked at e-editions of newspapers, and they appeal to me much more than reading stories on a newspaper website. It's just like reading the print edition, with all the advantages everyone has mentioned.

My question (as a copy editor/page designer) is ... if the print edition goes away, will the e-editions? I can't imagine "laying out" pages just for tablet readers. But who knows?

 

On the Kindle Paperwhite, it's not an e-edition, it's essentially the same design every day. You can get either a straight list of stories, or you can click on individual sections for a better view with headlines and photos. Reading it is like reading, say, a printer-friendly version on paper from the Web site.

 

Well, the New York Times was an enormous portion of that bill. The price they have for print delivery seems designed to drive people to table subscriptions.

 

The most basic Kindle is now just $69. Well worth it.

 

But that has no color, and no backlight, and I'm not even sure what kind of web access it has. Fine for reading some stuff, esp. books, but I'd hate to use it for most magazines and newspapers. The photos would suck.

 

No PDFs or similar for the newspapers I've subscribed to. The papers I've subscribed to are laid out as Dick described.

However, the magazines I've looked at (some offered free subscriptions for a few weeks) on the Kindle Fire are designed like that -- they basically mimic a print edition, and you flip through the pages. From what I understand, some newspapers on Fire and on other tablets (iPad) are designed like more like that.

Did a quick trip to Youtube, here's a video with an example of a newspaper on the Fire and a magazine. http://youtu.be/9jmCk3K3YT8?t=3m

 

There is a market for application of print design principles to good tablet presentation -- see the Wall Street Journal/New York Times for the best examples. But I think the design trend is going to lean more toward the more digital-esque responsive design (which changes based on the screen size of the device from which you view it) such as bostonglobe.com or The Atlantic's website (best example is the business pub Quartz, at qz.com).

 

Page design skills definitely seem like something that will continue to lose value over the coming years. I just don't know how much value returned there is, at this point. It's so much more efficient to have a rigid template, and just plug the content in.