Get the New York Times on iPad via BN... sort of

Update: Barnes & Noble's PR team pinged us to point out two salient points. #1, the message above does in fact note that only the iPod touch and iPhone versions of the newspaper/magazine subscriptions are temporarily offline -- the iPad subs are still available, as I found. #2, via the "Go To" button at the top of the eReader app screen, you can access an abbreviated table of contents (a list of the paper's sections); that's a help, but still not a particularly well-adapted navigational approach for all the stories in the NYT. My apologies for the errors.

We got the heads-up from reader Jehuda S. that Barnes & Noble is now listing the New York Times as available for subscription or single-copy download into the company's B&N eReader app. A quick check of B&N's site does indeed show the paper available for $0.99 a day, or $19.99 for a monthly subscription -- the monthly price is the same as Amazon's Kindle version, but that edition isn't available for iPhone or iPad yet. Amazon's deal with the NYT is a possible explanation for the kneecapped Editor's Choice app, which doesn't offer the paper's full content.

Great, so the paper's ready for prime time on the iPad courtesy of Mr. Barnes and Mr. Noble? Well, not so much. First of all, even though I was able to go through with the $0.99 purchase of today's paper [for my iPad], the site is featuring a banner update as seen above -- newspaper delivery is being 'temporarily suspended' to the ~~iDevices~~ iPhone and iPod touch, with a 'better reading experience' around the corner.

That's good, because the current reading experience is downright cringeworthy. There's no navigation to speak of except for section front pages and 'next story' / 'previous story' -- in order to see the whole paper, you have to scroll via the page scroller at the bottom (today's edition shows as 525 screensful, not easy to manage). There's no master table of contents, ~~no overall list of sections~~, no moxie whatsoever. It's a bit like someone faxing you the New York Times, story by story -- not at all a positive way to consume this premium content.

I can't recommend you get the Times in this fashion until B&N revamps the reader; good news is, it looks like there's consensus on that point over at B&N.

Thanks Jehuda!

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Source: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?…

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Update: Barnes & Noble's PR team pinged us to point out two salient points. #1, the message above does in fact note that only the...

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Smitty

It's not necessarily the B&N software, but the Times delivering it in PDF format to save their precious page layout. Designers and those who want to go the cheap/easy way in transforming content from a layout to a single page can opt for PDF output, but that translates into a static, FAXed-looking page. The dreaded "page on the screen", rather than selectable, searchable, re-flowable text and multimedia mixed into a tasty bouillabaisse. Even the iBooks experience is poor when converting static PDFs to ePub. No search, no selecting, no copy/paste.

No Thanks, publishers. We want true digital, not digital copies of dead tree editions!

July 22 2010 at 4:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Joe stalin

Why even pay a cent? Just go to Barry's website www.whitehouse.gov and read it direct! Why pay the transcribers?

July 21 2010 at 6:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Jason

I noticed this but hadn't taken advantage of it yet. I think this may illustrate the primary reason why Apple hasn't moved more swiftly to create a newspaper/magazine store to go along with iBooks: It's not easy to take old media and repackage it fluidly as new media. Old media hasn't completely embraced the digital format. Granted, NYT often leads the field when it comes to technological innovation, so this may not be their fault, but when trying to efficiently and quickly format old media to work on the iPad (or any digital device), Apple doesn't want to put out a half-assed experience like B&N have done here. I would guess even the Kindle periodical reading experience isn't up to Apple's standards. (If that's true, having experienced it myself, I would have to concur.) I would bet that Apple will come out with an "iNewsstand", but to get the experience right, it may not be until iOS 5 or so.

July 21 2010 at 3:05 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply