Review: Finally! Easy to Read; Easy to Skim
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 15, 2008
I live in Boston and had been waiting for the Boston Globe to become available for the Kindle since mine arrived on December 4, 2007. I subscribed the first day I found out about it and have not been disappointed. I am not a big print newspaper fan, I find them environmentally unfriendly, dirty (think blank ink on hand), and they contain a lot of information I usually have no interest in (ads, sports, stock lists, etc.) so they are thicker than I need them to be and messy. I won't even take the two free papers offered at the subway on most days (the excellent Metro and the whiny bloggy Boston Now). On the other hand I find the web version of newspapers hard to drill down to find the articles that apply only to today - if you know the topic you can do a search but there's really no way to tell if I at least skimmed all the articles for the day.Enter the Kindle edition which solves most of my complaints about the print and web edition of the Boston Globe, while all the material I am not interested in is still there it is easy to bypass and doesn't really cause any clutter or eat up resources (a few kb of disc space I guess). Some pictures are now beginning to appear too. The ads are gone (so unless you only buy the paper for the ads - some people do - you will be pleased). The Contents, Sections and Next Article layout is great. From the main page you can just skim all the headlines by hitting the next page button until you get to the end - and then you'll know you haven't missed any of today's headlines. If you want more detail you can select the headline link. You can then once finished reading the article (or deciding only to read some of it or none of it) easily hit the back button to return to the list, or if you've finished the article you can go forward directly to the next story (comes in handy in your favorite section if you know you want to read most articles there). The only thing that's missing is the comics and the death notices but you can read those on-line at the comic sites in the first case and the Globe's site in the case of death notices - if you really, really want to.Good job.