So I’ve been living with The Guardian’s Digital Edition for a few weeks and I’m even more convinced. It really is the first good analogue for a real newspaper I’ve come across. I would seriously consider dropping the printed paper for this. I’m inspired because I’d sort of concluded that this would never happen. The best thing about it is that I can almost literally flick through it, reproducing exactly my (probably highly inefficient) daily newspaper habits if I want to, but also making the paper markedly more accessible by giving me the equivalent of the biggest kitchen table in the world to spread the papers out on (plus a pretty good search function).
Of course, whether The Guardian could actually make money from a digital edition is still up in the air but I reckon there must be some mileage in selling this as a service to other publishers. In fact, if I could add a bunch of other publications to my giant kitchen table and flick through them in the same way I would probably sign up on the spot. A new pop-up menu in the left-hand nav could bring up digital editions of all my favourites – especially the ones that currently have dreadful or non-existent web sites. In fact, I think even quite competent online periodicals like The Economist or The New Statesman or New Scientist could benefit from the Guardian’s approach. They’d all be improved by a dose of the giant kitchen table treatment. The Guardian might find that they’re sitting on an emerging standard for the presentation of printed publications online. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Hmm, no – doesn’t really work for me. The thing about skimming newspapers, is that I skim the headline and the first paragraph or pullquotes. I can’t see those on the small PDF and so don’t bother looking at it after the first page or two – only the headlines on the right. I got through about 10 pages before not being interested anymore…