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November072008

The New Yorker Digital Edition, a Few Early Reactions

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , ,

I’m looking at the New Yorker Digital Edition, and I thought I’d get a few initial thoughts down here.

  • Is this the most ambitious integration of a magazine on the Internet that we have yet seen? If anybody reading this can think of something comparable, please write in and let us know! To summarize: every subscriber to the magazine now receives, in addition to the physical version in the mailbox, an identical version of the magazine (including layout and ads) in a digital format that can be viewed in any browser wherever there is an Internet connection. Furthermore, every subscriber may now view every single issue the magazine has ever published. The Internet is a palpable problem for magazine publishers, because they are an expensive proposition and the audience is spoiled by widespread free content on the Internet. The New Yorker can use assets that less lofty magazines cannot bring to bear, but this may be an exciting model for other magazine publishers to consider.
  • If you attempt to access an archived issue as a non-subscriber, the program inquires whether you would like to purchase the issue for $4.99. In this way the model could potentially increase revenue over and above the subscription revenue. Quoting from the Digital Edition: “For $4.99, you’ll receive access—for one year—to the entire issue in which the article you’re looking for originally ran.” Question: will people confronted with such a demand opt for a subscription instead? How many articles does one have to want to read before a subscription is a better use of one’s money? On Amazon you can get a year’s subscription for $39.95, so that’s about the cost of 8 individual articles. I think this aspect of the model may well lead to an increase in subscriptions.
  • The search function within the Digital Edition itself is limited to the issue you are viewing. I noticed something rather tantalizing: I was looking at the May 31, 2004, issue (the one with the William Finnegan article on Barack Obama), and I did a search on “Bill Clinton.” Two hits came up, apparently responding to full-text hits. (The search results seem to reproduce the actual lines of text in which “Bill Clinton” appeared.) Anyone who has used The Complete New Yorker DVD archive knows that this is potentially a big item, because The Complete New Yorker limits the user to a keyword/abstract search (it’s a bit more complicated than that, sometimes searches appear to respond to text that is not limited to the “library card” presented in the “article abstract” section). In any case, anything resembling full-text search capability is pretty awesome. I think we need to hear more about this.
  • As Jonathan Taylor was the first to notice, you can now execute a search at newyorker.com, and if an article is not available on the website, the abstract result now includes a link that brings you to the article in the Digital Edition. That works seamlessly, it’s very impressive.
  • Dig the URL format for linking to articles in the Digital Edition, it looks like this:
    http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2004-05-31#folio=032
    (That’s the Obama article again.) The “032” is a page number. So if you know the date of the issue and the page number (remember to use a placeholder zero or two to keep it a three-digit number), you can generate a valid URL on the fly. At Emdashes, we will endeavor to include such links to articles as we move forward.
  • What about royalties? The Complete New Yorker is the legacy of judicial rulings stating that a magazine publisher has the right to reproduce the full magazine but not in such a way that the individual articles can be copied with impunity. Does the Digital Edition maintain this logic? It probably does—you still can’t grab an ASCII version of any article and put it on your website. (I’ve always felt that this Solomonic judicial ruling struck an ideal middle path between protecting the rights of contributors and the public good of making the magazine available to all at an affordable price.)
  • Look and feel: I like the usability but it’s juuuust a bit pinched. I’m not crazy about the dialog boxes that pop up, but that’s a small thing and I expect it to change over time. It’ll be interesting to see how it all evolves. On my MacBook, the bottom toolbar is almost always off the screen, meaning I have to scroll down to access it. The left/right buttons are a little “HTML-y” for my taste, but I do like that the interface responds well to the left and right arrow buttons. Flipping through the magazine is enjoyable, but the experience of dipping in and out of pages might need to improve a little bit. Still: this is a great beginning.
  • Hey, recent issues have active links to the web! You can click on any URL in the issue, whether it be in New Yorker content or in advertisements. Pretty sneaky, sis. In addition, the table of contents (for new issues) is hyperlinked to enable you to access every article directly from there, which is a nice touch.

Comments

Just got to give the digital edition a whirl. My first impression? Awesome.

My only caveat (and it’s a big one): the Complete New Yorker has a button that allows you to jump to those pages with cartoons. I don’t see that on the Digital Edition. What’s up with that?

I like that TOC hyperlink, too! More reactions to follow as I browse and bathe.

Are you sure the sample url
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2004-05-31#folio=032

shouldn’t be:
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2004-05-31&folio=032

i.e. ampersand in place of hash character?

That would translate as issue date[*]; ampersand to indicate page, or Folio=032, with a future option to follow that by a hash to indicate position within particular document or, here, page. But then of course, the TNY Digital serves but PDF-files, which (currently) can not be adressed with greater granularity, down to a specific paragraph (and below!) level.

[*] at last in ISO/European logical format, not this traditional old-tyme-English one, where one can never be sure whether numerals<=12 followed by like stand for month-day, or day-month. Possibly still too-radical a change for paper-TNY….

That doesn’t work in Firefox on my Mac (it just adds a second hashmark string pointing to the cover). It seems to me that this is not a Digital Reader problem as much as a browser problem. We’ll see.

The New Yorker has finally caught on to an idea that Zinio (www.Zinio.com) has been on to for years—that going digital is an absolutely indispensible way of keeping your publication afloat, especially in these tough economic times, not to mention the fact that it’s much greener. Zinio has over 1,000 titles of magazines including Esquire, Elle, Cosmopolitan, BusinessWeek, BlackBook, AdAge, and tons more. I found it especially interesting that you’re impressed with the searchability of the New Yorker’s archive—Zinio just launched a search feature called INSIDE that offers the same searchability of digital content, with the added ability to share pages of content on social networking sites, blogs, and email to friends. Plus, with new titles going digital-only every day (Tuesday, PC Mag, today, US News and World Report), I think we’re going to see a MAJOR paradigm shift to digital. Good for the New Yorker for getting in the game now.

I would love to look at the digital edition. I live in Germany, and have subscribed through their German agent for the last 15 years. And the subscription costs lots more that $39.95 per year!
But- while I don’t have an American subscription, with an American account number, I cannot get access. I tried contacting the New Yorker subscription department- this is outsourced, and they think I live on the moon or something.
There are lots of us here that are subscribers, and yet no provision has been made for us to also have access.
Really unfair!

David OppermanDecember 26, 2008

I was extremely disappointed with the digital reader interface. I am curious if you actually tried to read a substantial article this way? I found it so frustrating that I doubt I will ever use it other than for skimming or looking up things I already read in print.

The main problem for me is that the default size, though fine for leafing through the virtual pages, is too small for actually reading an article. So whenever you find something you want to read you have to click to enlarge the page. But then the page still doesn’t fit entirely on the screen (even in fullscreen mode on my 22-inch wide screen display). So you have to drag the page around (like scrolling) to get the parts you want into view. And then you can’t access the controls for moving to the next page! You have to click to unzoom, move on to the next page, click to unzoom again, possibly drag to get the desired text in view, and then drag it around to view the various pieces.

I think it could be usable if one could get a zoomed view that included a whole page at a legible size and also made the controls visible as needed.

@ Anders: I can understand why you’re frustrated. However, I’ve found that I can turn pages in “read” mode without having to go out to “flip” mode by double-clicking on the screen — the DE flips the page and starts at the top, lefthand corner of the next page.

The same trick works (though not as well) if you’re on the lefthand page of two facing pages - double-clicking will take you to near the top of the facing page - a little extra “up arrow” is necessary to get you to the start of the page.

Once I’m on a page, it does fit horizontally within my screen, and I simply use the “Page Up/Down” or arrow keys to scroll down and up. I find it’s actually pretty smooth - about as smoothly as the Complete New Yorker on DVD/hard drive.

@ David: that’s really irritating - I wonder if it has to do with the limits of copyright law (which is also why, I believe, TNY hasn’t made its text searchable)-? In any case, Martin, who spends large amounts of time in Austria, might have some insight into this problem.

@Jess H: I wasn’t aware of Zinio before now; thanks for the tip. I do note that, unlike TNY, Zinio does not seem to be making available decades of past content for, say, Esquire, but offering digital issues going forward. This is much easier from a copyright point of view.

It’s my guess that TNY either had to figure out how to pay all of its contributors (or their estates) for re-using their content, or find a way to deliver the content digitally that was substantially unchanged from its original form (i.e., something akin to reprinting old issues of the magazine, for which use it had already paid).

Hence — perhaps — the Digital Edition’s “late” appearance, and its limitations in terms of sharing and searchability.

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