Shiny New Toy Watch
The Guardian
10 Nov 2006
For the last 2 years, I’ve been a subscriber to the electronic edition of the Washington Post. The electronic edition is very different from washingtonpost.com, capturing the actual print edition of the paper, ads and all. If you’re on the road and want to read your hometown rag, it’s a pretty convenient way to go.
The Washington Post is transferring its electronic publishing services to PressDisplay.com. What’s cool about this is that instead of subscribing to the electronic version of a particular paper, you’re subscribing to a fixed number of editions. That means, for a fixed subscription price of $9.95/month, you can read 31 Washington Posts, or 25 Washington Posts and 6 Le Figaros, or any combination of the journals they carry.
There’s also some built-in blogging tools that allow you to directly reference the print edition of the paper. This is important for a couple of reasons. First, what you link to online may change as the story gets re-written. That could mean that quotes you take from a story may not exist when someone actually gets around to reading your blog. Secondly, there is a great deal of contextual information that’s communicated by the printed page that isn’t by the online version. Particularly, the relative significance of stories, and how they relate to each other. Services like PressDisplay.com that reference the print edition directly resolve both of these issues.
