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Originally Posted by weatherman
I read the NY Times daily on my Kindle, and it's the main reason I got it (as a replacement for my Sony PRS-500). I find the experience incredibly easy and efficient, and from the research I've done it would seem that the NY Times Kindle Edition has the same content as the NY Times digital print edition. That is different than the online version, since the latter updates over the course of the day, but I actually prefer the fact that it's "static" for one day, since it means that I'm always returning to the same list of articles that I started with. Maybe eventually I'd crave an "evening edition" or something, but I'm not that much of a news junkie - I'd rather have better, deeper articles than just a set of 200-300 word updates or alerts.
I navigate the times by going to the TOC and then selecting the list of articles, rather than going through the articles one by one. This is done (for those who don't know) by moving the cursor under the number next to the section name. The number indicates how many articles are in that section. Selecting this gives a list of headlines and excerpts from articles in that section. When you select an article you can read just that one or continue to browse linearly from there. Hit the "back" button and it goes back to the list of articles. Hit "back" again and it goes to the TOC.
I find that reading the newspaper on the Kindle is much faster and much more efficient, and I really like being able to clip articles from the paper digitally. For my needs, it's the killer app of the Kindle.
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Generally, I would agree, the Kindle developers obviously gave it a lot of thought, and with a little experience and experimentation (using the joystick, for example, "clipping" articles), it is, if anything, much easier and cheaper to read than the printed version. On the whole, this is very close to the killer ap that everyone's after, in terms of ebook readers (epaper readers? ;-). And certainly the Kindle paper is much cheaper than the printed one (I suppose because of materials and distribution costs). The thing too, that I always hated about the NYT and most any other paper was the dreaded "continued on page...". Especially on a plane or other confined reading space, or just on the kitchen table, going in to finish off an article is a pain. And then you're back and forth, may miss something, etc.
But I do have a couple of caveats, in terms of my reading newspapers on Kindle. Hopefully these will get addressed with the DX, or when NYT and Amazon bundle in the fall. The first is a small caveat, there are times when the ads are not so bad, convey info I wouldn't mind having, so they should work out something where the advertisers pay to have them downloaded, to offset the cell cost, or have them computer loaded, whatever. Don't screw up the articles, keep those in one piece, but a nice to have. The bigger caveat, is that with the NYT, they drop a lot of graphical content. Pictures come through sometimes, they need to be 100%, if it's printed, it should be Kindled. And graphs. A picture is worth a thousand words. If it doesn't fit in the cell download model, charge more, or let me get it via computer (cannot be
that much at the server level).
About being able to look over a whole printed page, at a glance, maybe, but the table of contents works mostly for me. I should note, however, my wife is a bit more the Luddite, and probably the reason we'll continue to have a printed subscription for some time. She likes to read the NYT on nights and weekends, when we have more time, she can backup in terms of when she gets to it for weeks, months, sometimes I suspect years. She reads only certain sections, but she reads them thoroughly. Seems like she'll never adopt to the Kindle model of a "Daily" newspaper. But maybe Amazon and NYT can actually turn that around a bit, storing the papers is actually a PITA, and they could develop a more download-section-on-demand model, say where a user could go get all the entertainment or food or book sections for a week, or keep the daily, but mark what's read better. This could actually turn also to Kindle's competitive advantage with a little bit more programming.