Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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373 of 380 people found the following review helpful:
Very good electronic version, pricing not quite there yet., November 26, 2007
To put this review in perspective I've been reading the NY Times every day for several years on my PDA, as delivered electronically by avantgo.com. That edition has been my 'gold standard' for e-reading because I can download it in just a few minutes as my coffee brews along with the Washington Post and London Times, and then read it as I have my coffee, or take it with me to read on a commute. (When I'm travelling I can get my daily dose of newspapers from avantgo as long as there is wifi nearby.)
NY Times recently made significant improvements to their avantgo edition, so it includes all the major sections of the paper. The articles are all text, no ads, and interestingly on the PDA the pictures are quite good and in color(!). But...although the main articles are included, many are not because of the format, space, whatever. Bottom line, there are still enough articles that I run out of time before I run out of articles. The only drawback (for me) is that the PDA form factor, while great for travel, is a little space-challenged. Nevertheless, as I mentioned, it's my 'gold standard' for electronic editions since I don't want to carry my laptop everywhere. And the avantgo service is free.
So I was pretty excited to compare the Kindle subscription edition with what I've been using. To cut to the chase I'm happy to report that, for me, the Kindle edition is far superior. There are many more articles, improved navigation and of course the form factor! I was overwhelmed with the Sunday edition which has the magazine and book reviews in addition to the regular news. All-in-all a great offering.
Now about the price of the subscription. I thought it was too high until I went and looked at the alternative offerings. Turns out it's half the price of the print edition, and just about the same price as the electronic edition. (Of course the web edition and avantgo are free in comparison.) So I can see where NY Times slotted this subscription, I have to say it fits in pretty well with the alternatives.
But...I'm afraid it won't succeed at this price. And that concerns me because I really want these Kindle subscriptions to be wild successes and stoke the Kindle experience itself. (Which is why I'm taking the time and trouble to write this review.)
The price point needs to be $9.95, or even $5.95 to get significant traction. People who will subscribe are not choosing between print and electronic, they are choosing between Kindle and free (web or PDA) electronic alternatives.
My claim here is that any income the NY Times gets from a Kindle subscription is incremental, and they are not going to capture these subscribers thru one of their other channels. In my own case I'm willing to go from a zero cost subscription to a paid subscription, but not at the current price.
I'm disappointed the Times doesn't seem to see the potential of e-delivery as offered by Kindle, at least as far as pricing their product to make it a wild success...
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113 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
Very good, but could be better, December 22, 2007
I currently pay $35 a month for a six-day subscription to the print edition. The Kindle edition only costs $14 a month. So, if the Kindle edition of the NYT can replace my print subscription, the Kindle pays for itself in just over a year and a half and I get the Sunday NYT 'for free'. Beyond that, the Kindle edition doesn't involve killing trees or using noxious chemicals to turn them into paper, and beaming my paper to me every morning takes a lot less fossil fuel than trucking trees to a mill, trucking paper to a press, then delivering the printed paper to my driveway. Plus, I never have to go out in the cold or the rain to find my paper in the bushes or under my car; I should never have to deal with a missed paper, which happens once or twice a month with my delivery service; I never have to suspend delivery when I go on a trip; and my newspaper will actually go with me.
So, I have a lot of incentive to like the NYT on the Kindle.
After three days, I'm still not sure if I do.
On the plus side, my biggest worry before my Kindle arrived turns out to be a non-starter. I wondered how I'd take to reading the news on a screen only a few paragraphs big. As promised, this is not an issue. After a very short time, you don't really notice the paging any more than you notice turning the page of a book, or moving your eyes to the next column. I've read a whole novel without any annoyance, and actually find the comfortably sized Kindle less of a hassle than a broadsheet newspaper. (My SO is looking forward to no more piles of old newspapers on the kitchen table, even if that means our 13 yo won't be reading the paper any more.)
Also, I find I really don't miss the experience of flipping through the paper, looking for those interesting stories that didn't make the front page. You can browse section by section, and paging through a section a story at a time is really not bad.
You can store a lot of days worth of news in a stock Kindle, and can search them all quickly; you can store even more if you add a cheap SD card. In the unlikely event that the Times uses a word you don't know, you can quickly look it up with the Kindle's great search feature.
On the minus side, comparing my print edition to the Kindle edition, I can see that the print edition includes stories that the Kindle edition does not. I'm really not sure quite what to make of this: so far, at least, I'm actually reading more of the paper than I used to, because I can carry my Kindle to work and read articles in dead time. It's hard to know how to balance not even seeing some stories vs reading a lot more of them. (I do know that I really miss the Market Gauges pages even if, realistically, I only look at them a few times a month.)
A less ambiguous minus is the pictures, which (to use a technical term) really suck. They're hard to make out, and there's a max of one per story, no matter how many there are in the print version. Even worse, many of the pictures and - so far as I can see - ALL the charts and graphs are omitted. This hurts business coverage; I haven't seen a Science Section yet, but I imagine this will be really painful.
So. Convenience, greenness, and economics vs the loss of maybe 15% of the content. This is a hard call, for me, and I sure wish the NYT would make it easier by including the missing content.
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122 of 127 people found the following review helpful:
Great price for a great newspaper, December 5, 2007
I don't know what other reviewers have been smoking to think that $13.99 per month for The New York Times is expensive.
Every Sunday before my Kindle came I would pause at newsstands and look longingly at the Sunday New York Times, mentally calculating if it was worth paying four dollars for a huge, heavy, difficult to carry mass of paper that I would have to cart around on a subway and a train until I finally got it home. The Sunday edition alone costs 52 weeks times $4 = $208 -- by comparison the Kindle version costs me $13.99 times 12 = $167 for all 365 issues.
Furthermore, my Kindle edition of the New York Times is always ready and waiting for me no matter how early I wake up in the morning. This is always nice, but particularly so on holidays when the the New York Times often sells out at the newsstands early.
I find myself reading a lot more of the New York Times using my Kindle than I used to read in the pre-Kindle era. I particularly find myself reading more of the Arts section. Another good thing about the Kindle edition is that I find myself reading an article from start to finish, whereas there was always a great tendency to skim articles in the pre-Kindle days.
The Kindle New York Times does a good job of including pictures. They are a little fuzzy but good enough to give the general idea.
It's true there are no classified ads, but it's rare I need them, so on those occasions I don't mind buying the paper edition.
I also particularly like the ability on the Kindle to quickly look up the meaning of a word in the New York Times I don't understand.
I can't think of any better way to quickly and methodically gain an in depth understanding of the world around us, than to subscribe to the Kindle edition of the New York Times. It's a truly great newspaper.
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