august 27, 2008
My wife loves coupons, so we have a subscription to the Sunday edition of the San Jose Mercury News. A little over a week ago, we got a little insert that was advertising the "e-Edition" of the paper. "It's every page of the Mercury news in digital form," the insert proclaimed. The promotional rates were $14 for one year and $25 for two years (use this link to get the promotional prices, which apparently will end August 31, 2008). At that price, subscribing wasn't painful -- even if to try it out.
I signed up for a two-year subscription last Monday and it took seven business days (or, nine internet days) to get my subscription activated! Huh? If a dead tree media company wants to show that it is technologically progressive, the sign-up process should be a hell of a lot faster (ie. using carrier pigeons to shuffle around new subscription orders is not a good thing). I got my account confirmation yesterday, it let me know that starting this morning (5:30am sharp), I would be able to access the site and today's paper.
I read the newspaper this morning and the experience itself was not half bad.
- The online reader is decent, though the UI is not very well thought out. Flipping through the paper was easy and fast, thank goodness.
- The graphics are sharp enough and the text is very readable in the graphical mode. The viewer panel, when in the graphical mode, allows for dragging the page around for easier reading.
- There is a dedicated text mode where the text is laid out in standard text format.
- All advertisements are included in the digital version -- which, for me is a benefit as I can browse the Fry's ads with ease.
- There is the ability to download a full copy of the paper in PDF format, which is nice. The PDF copy of the paper is fully searchable and you can copy text from it. There is no DRM on the PDF version and you can download either the full edition or just selected pages. This makes for a good way to "clip" things from the digital edition.
There are some issues with the site though.
- It is a digital copy, so why is accessing/searching for anything past 30 days not allowed? Digital subscribers should have access to the full San Jose Mercury News archive (or whatever has been digitized).
- The main login page resizes the browser window for no apparent reason.
- There are no account management tools whatsoever. I cannot find out how long I have left on my subscription I cannot cancel the autopay (which is turned on by default) I cannot update the email address associated with the account (I found a way of doing it this morning, but I can't seem to find the link again). There is no way to change your password. Lose your password? You have to send email to an email address or call a 1-800 to recover it. What kind of high-tech solution is this?
- When reading articles in the text mode, one is still forced to "page jump" (thank goodness they at least hotlinked the page jump). In text mode, the whole article should be shown without a page jump. In graphical mode, the page jump is not hotlinked in the image, you have to "flip" to the page yourself.
- The downloaded PDFs have no index. So, if you are trying to find a page in the Business section, you have to go flipping around to get to it.
- There is no way of getting rid of the full-page preview panel on the left-hand side so that you can have a wider reading area on the right-hand side.
- Can someone tell me what the difference is between the five different editions?
I don't know if the digital edition is worth the full asking price: For a year subscription they are asking $60 and for a two-year subscription they are asking $100. That is half the price of the print edition, but this is a digital edition, it should really be a lot less expensive. For the promotional price, the digital subscription serves as a good supplement to Yahoo! News. Lets see how I feel about the digital edition after my two-year subscription runs dry. Maybe by then, I will like it enough to resubscribe at full price. Maybe not.
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My wife loves coupons, so we have a subscription to the Sunday edition of the San Jose Mercury News. A little over a week ago, we got a little insert that was advertising the "e-Edition" of the paper. "It's every page of the Mercury news in digital form," the insert proclaimed. The promotional rates were $14 for one year and $25 for two years (use this link to get the promotional prices, which apparently will end August 31, 2008). At that price, subscribing wasn't painful -- even if to try it out.
I signed up for a two-year subscription last Monday and it took seven business days (or, nine internet days) to get my subscription activated! Huh? If a dead tree media company wants to show that it is technologically progressive, the sign-up process should be a hell of a lot faster (ie. using carrier pigeons to shuffle around new subscription orders is not a good thing). I got my account confirmation yesterday, it let me know that starting this morning (5:30am sharp), I would be able to access the site and today's paper.
I read the newspaper this morning and the experience itself was not half bad.