After twenty years of having my daily newspaper delivered to my door, I've decided to stop reading paper-based news and to look for an electronic equivalent instead. I'm posting this in the hope that it will be of interest to other forum members who might be considering the same move. I’d also welcome any advice and comments on the various options available.
My paper of choice is
The Herald - one of only two national newspapers available here in Scotland. I pay around £450 (US$750) per year to have it delivered to my breakfast table. I resent having to pay so much money, especially as I never read more than half the paper (I discard the sports, motoring, appointments and lifestyle sections, and rarely look at the TV/radio or classified ads). I also dislike having to carry all that newsprint to the recycle bin every week. Another gripe: The paper occasionally arrives late, in which case I don't get time to read it.
So some form of electronic delivery seems like a good choice. What are the options?
Newspaper's own website
The Herald's website (
www.heraldscotland.com) carries the same stores as the printed edition, but like too many newspaper sites, it's not designed for easy browsing. The home page shows the main headlines. You click the headline to read the story, then click back to the home page and repeat the process for the next one. To read something other than a main story, you have to drill down into one of the special sections (business, sport, whatever), then click back up the hierarchy to find the next article. What's really needed is a button that simply takes you forward one article at a time.
Pros: Easily available. Free.
Cons: Difficult to browse. Also, this particular site is plagued with intrusive advertising, flashy animations, ticker tapes and other annoyances that make reading a pain.
Newspaper Direct
This service (
www.newspaperdirect.com) offers electronic delivery of over 1,400 newspapers in 92 countries. The interface is just right. You view a facsimile of the printed edition, and zoom in to read each story just as it's laid out on the page. Or, you can hover the mouse over a headline to see a popup window showing a summary of the story. You can navigate pages in sequence or by clicking on thumbnails. You can also save the paper to a file or print a custom version.
Pros: Great interface.
Cons: Costs money (£100 or US$165 per year [after a 30-day trial]). And you have to go out of your way to cancel the subscription; if you don't, it's automatically renewed. (You can also purchase single copies, but these cost more than the printed version.)
Wireless delivery direct to my Kindle
This might be the best option for many people, but not for me. That's partly because I don't have Whispernet access, and partly because no Scottish papers are available on this service. If my paper does become available, I'd probably subscribe to it, and read it via the Kindle for PC application (or transfer it my Kindle via USB every morning).
RSS feed to Calibre; convert to ebook format
This involves setting up Calibre (
www.calibre-ebook.com) to automatically fetch the newspaper content each morning and then convert it to Mobi format, which I can read in either the Mobi Pocket or Kindle for PC application (or transfer to my Kindle via USB).
This approach provides the best option for browsing. The stories appear consecutively, with no need to click up and down a hierarchy in order to navigate. You just "turn the page" to go from one story to the next. You can select the sections you want to receive, and you can even combine sections from different publications. One irritation: In
The Herald, each article is followed by several pages of links to other articles; you have to keep skipping past these pages, which is tedious.
Pros: Free. Automatic (I can set up Calibre to download and convert the paper before I get up each morning, and have the news waiting for me on my laptop on the breakfast table).
Cons: The initial setup takes a bit of effort (Calibre comes with many newsfeeds pre-configured, but the one to
The Herald is broken).
I still have a couple of weeks to run on my subscription to the printed newspaper. After that, I'll have to choose an option for electronic delivery. Right now, I'm inclined to go for the Calibre option. But I'm still open to other suggestions.