Quote:
Originally Posted by Leep
Since Kindle is the 'wireless' solution in the U.S., if you want to access newspapers and magazines easily while traveling, it is probably the best solution. There is, of course, a fee for purchasing these periodicals. You can review the availability and subscription charges at Amazon's kindle website.
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Newspapers and magazines delivered automatically over Whispernet seems like a miracle. But for the, uh, thrifty, one can get many of them for free on the Kindle from Calibre via USB, now that Calibre supports .mobi output. (Similarly, you can also get them free for the Sony Reader and other e-readers in .lrf or .epub format.) Using the OP's original example, The Calibre version of The Economist for May 11th was 657 pages formatted for a 6" e-book reader. You can see what the latest issue will look like on a 6" e-reader by previewing it in Calibre on your PC: install Calibre, Fetch News (The Economist), View.
Calibre offers many more news/magazine selections than Amazon, and you can ask for new ones on the forum here, or create your own. Sometimes there are RSS feed problems when the source website changes something that causes Calibre to be unable to retrieve the news/magazine, but they usually get fixed within a week or two.
Another thing I don't think has been mentioned in this thread is that several public libraries offer e-books (if yours doesn't, you can do what many do and join the NY Public Library for $100/yr.). The majority of those e-books are in Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) format, which can't be read on the Kindle (though a minority of those e-books are in .mobi format which *can* be read on the Kindle). Some people don't like the formatting in these ADE e-books and refuse to read them. E.g., run-on paragraphs where it becomes difficult to distinguish who is speaking in dialogues, or e.g., lost em dashes. Others don't mind. The Sony Readers can read ADE, as may others, but not the Kindle.
EDIT: Last para. may be wrong about Kindle not capable of reading most library e-books, if you can convert ADE via ineptpdf and ineptepub, which seems to be what wallcraft said in the post directly above. Sorry, I don't know about these de-DRM tools. (The Sonys can read ADE natively.)