I recently re-subscribed to a real-life, old-fashioned newspaper. I like the digital edition, but prefer the paper version. The resolution is amazing and you can't beat the loading times, and I never run into browser incompatibility issues. There are still too many ads, but they don't pop up and dance.
I'm the opposite. I hate physical newspaper. Don't get me wrong, I like physically printed sheets, but newspaper is the worst quality paper. It tears easily and is partially see-through which means if I'm holding it up against a light (like an open window), it gets hard to read.
And if I'm reading next to an open window and a breeze blows by, the chances that my paper will (at best) get blown around or (at worst) torn are pretty high, again due to how fragile the paper is.
The ink also gets all over everything when I touch it, so if I'm reading the paper at breakfast, I either eat ink when I pick up my toast or I'm washing my hands every time I turn a page.
Meanwhile, when I'm done reading the paper and want to return it to the pile for someone else to read, I have to carefully fold each section and each page and try to get them all back into a neat order, which never happens.
I also disagree on the "resolution is amazing" comment. Maybe my subscription is lower quality than others, but even in the New York Times, the pictures are awful, awful quality compared to digital.
And they're printed once a day, so if an important event happens at noon, I won't get to read about it until tomorrow morning.
And the worst part of it all? Printing all of these copies, every day, distributing them on trucks, and then they get thrown away. A newspaper is the absolute worst way to consume news. Absolute worst. Yeah it might feel nice to sit and read a newspaper, but part of me says that's nostalgia/wistfulness talking. Every piece of a newspaper is the worst way to present that particular thing, from ink to paper to organization to pictures to the news itself.
>And they're printed once a day, so if an important event happens at noon, I won't get to read about it until tomorrow morning.
I don't like reading printed newspapers any longer either, but the one good thing about them is that they are printed once a day. News is not something that you need to know about instantly. The only things we need to know about in real time are existential threats. That is not news, that is an emergency broadcast or alert, which is not what news is for.
Have you ever noticed that when 24-hour cable news covers things in real time, it's mostly just waiting around and bullshiting until something happens, and then they are forced to provide incomplete information that is more often than not, wrong.
The whole idea of a newspaper is that it provides some time between an event and when you learn about it. That time is used by the newspaper to collect information, fact check and provide a more complete account of an event. They still get stuff wrong, but it's still far better than twitter, or cable or any real-time firehose.
Learning about something that happened yesterday also gives the reader the distance to contemplate and thing about what happened as well instead of jumping on twitter or facebook and making an ass of yourself before knowing all the facts.
I tried it, but I found you have to manually run the garbage collector and the quick load times are due to local caching on low-density biodegradable WORM media cartridges. The transport protocol is only simplex and the packet transit time (can't even call it a ping time because it's simplex) is atrocious (there is a send() function but nonce tokens require in-app purchases).
I recently read a printed book for the first time in ages and had a really weird experience. I wanted to find a particular passage, but muscle memory took over and I found myself pressing Ctrl-F on my leg. For a fraction of a second, I thought that the book was broken. It took me a moment to remember to look in the index.
It really threw me for a loop. Electronic texts are so pervasive in my life that I had half forgotten how to interact with a printed book. My automatic familiarity with print had faded enough that I was consciously aware of the properties of the medium. I was frustrated by the inability to zoom in on diagrams or copy and paste. The margins weren't big enough for my notes. There was no autogenerated list of highlighted passages. I felt like a child confronted with a VHS tape or a classic Gameboy.
I grew up obsessed with books. At the back of my desk drawer, there's a little envelope containing the membership cards for eleven different library services. For most of my life, I rarely went anywhere without a book to hand. I spent a large part of my adolescence digging through the dustier shelves of second-hand book shops. Still, I can't shake the feeling that print is largely obsolete. I don't feel nostalgic about books, I'm just frustrated that so few of them are available in digital format.
I think I got a solution - every article is accompanied by a QR code that you can scan to open a searchable version of the exact same text. Just a couple of seconds away and you don't lose the papery-feel either.
We could provide a device -- say, in a nice friendly shape like a cat -- that can read these codes and open up the relevant text on their PC or iPad or whatever! What could possibly go wrong?
Skip the QR code and let the article itself be a code. Some magagines have implemented that already. It takes a specialized reader app but then the paper is not littered with QR codes all over.
Of course the lo-tech version is simply google the title and chances are you'll find the digital version of the article.
After almost a decade of not bothering with them, six months ago I signed back up for physical magazine subscriptions again. I decided I like having the physical artifact around sometimes. There's even a niche magazine (Vitamag) where I'm one of only about 100 people that pay for it through Patreon, that they actually print our names on a page of each book. That's a pretty cool feeling.
In one of the "fake news" threads here, someone suggested The Economist as a good weekly recap. I got a subscription for my wife for Christmas (she wasn't thrilled, but it's growing on her). We've both been enjoying having the physical magazines around, as we can pick one up and read a good 5 minute story with coffee or before bed.
Some articles have a clear moneyed establishment slant, but there's a lot of quality research and writing and a minimum of fluff.
I've had a subscription to three physical magazines for many years now; for two of them, it's been for 20 years. I've also kept all of those issues (ugh).
Recently, though, for one of the magazines I decided to get the CD version with PDFs (Servo Magazine); for the other two, it would be impossible to do this - Servo Magazine hasn't been out as long, and so it was easy to "catch up".
That's interesting to hear, since we're launching a quarterly of stories in 2017, as a classic magazine.
It will be digital and paper (comic book/pulp format to evoke the Amazing Stories feel), but we really wanted to get paper magazines out there for that same tangibility.
There's a 'joke' in my office, we have someone who circulates key headlines in a morning email because we all have electronic access to a slew of newspapers which means none of us read any of them.
Related, I renewed a print subscription to The Economist after spending the last ~5 years as a digital-only subscriber. I read so much more of the content when it's a physical item than by picking the articles with 'interesting' headlines.
I've done the same and found it is way less distracting. This means I get through more articles in a shorter period of time and with greater concentration. It also reduces the impulse to share on social media (and the associated brain power to come up with some witty comment about it).
Same. I got the financial times weekly. It's refreshing to read real, well-funded journalism.
And I find I can skim it with much leas distraction. Most pages have several articles, and it takes very little effort to scan headlines to see which ones to read.
