Times Reader first impressions

Previous coverage here and here

I found a PC at work where I could install the new Times Reader from the New York Times. These are my first impressions of the experience.

Before beginning, I should say that installing the Times Reader was a pain, as the PC hadn’t been updated since Windows XP Service Pack 1. Even the NET 3.0 download took forever to download and install on the computer.

As far as I can understand, the software downloads today’s edition of the Times much as you would a PDF of a printed paper. There’s a status bar at the top of the page that shows the progress. As the articles are loaded, you can start reading them, but I waited for the entire edition to download before beginning the experience. It took a while to download, even on the campus high-speed network.

The product works like a sort of cross between a web site and a newspaper. There are navigation buttons for each section of the Times newspaper at the top of the page. In some ways, it looks similar to the current online Times site.

But when you click on an individual story, the story is displayed as it would be on paper - in columns, with headlines and layout that look a lot like the Times’ print edition. The main difference being that there are sometimes hyperlinks within the stories, and the graphics can be enlarged.

Even with this print-centric layout, the stories usually stretch beyond one screen, so you click on a “next page” button at the bottom of the screen to advance to the next part of the story.

I’m certain this format will look more appealing when the Times rolls out the hardware that is supposed to support the Times Reader, but on the computer, I was underwhelmed.

First, the positives. Times Reader is a much better experience than any other PDF-based product I’ve seen so far, including the Missourian emprint PDF product, and the Technavia online edition format used by Washington Post. (You can also see a technavia product at the Vanderbilt Hustler). The Times Reader downloads the content, which gives it a step up on the Technavia product, and its functionality is more “web-like,” which puts it ahead of the emprint. It also includes a feature which allows it to check for updates at set times. The default is every 30 minutes, which eMprint doesn’t do. The eMprint edition you get is the final edition for the day. The Times Reader will allow you to update if there’s breaking news at some point.

If you want to read in a larger font size, when you increase the font size, Times Reader automatically resizes the columns of text.

Now the negatives.

The hyperlinks within the stories are hyperlinks within the Times, not hyperlinks to other content out there on the Web. This is more of a pet peeve than an actual bug.

I couldn’t find any multimedia - audio or video - in today’s edition of the Times Reader, and there appears to be no way to change the font from a serif font to a sans serif font, which I find easier to read on screen.

More importantly, I get the feeling from using the software that the whole point of the exercise is to control as much as possible the presentation of the information. It feels like an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, so to speak.

Whereas now, the Times’ staff has to try to fit content to web browsers and users who don’t like serif fonts for their body text, the Times Reader allows them to wrest control back and put it into the hands of designers who are, ironically, most likely working on Macintosh computers which can’t use Times Reader … yet.

I found the navigation elements to be the most confusing part of the whole experience. It seemed that they were not big enough and the page navigation didn’t stand out enough from the site navigation buttons.

The ads look like print ads. The graphics look like print graphics, etc. In fact, the few ads that I saw weren’t hyperlinked, except for a small URL at the bottom of the ad. Again, more like print than the web. But the ads were larger than what you’d often find on a web site.

Times futurist in residence Michael Rogers said:

The new Times Reader, on a tablet PC, is already a pretty good experience. Spin that forward five years and you’re starting to have a compelling alternative. Finally, in another decade, a substantial part of our audience will have grown up already doing much more of their reading on screen, and they’re not likely to have the same emotional attachment to paper as does much of the current readership.

Times Reader seems to me an attempt to jam together two different media - print and online - to come up with an alternative that will keep presentation control within the hands of the media while getting the content in the hands of tech-savvy readers.

That said, it will serve a purpose for someone who has a long commute to work on a subway. That person can download a copy of the Times onto a tablet PC or some yet-to-be-released “e-newspaper” and take it along for the ride. Eventually, I could see where the program would be useful for downloading several newspapers’ daily output for offline reading.

Final review:

As someone who is used to reading content in an online format, and gathering news from a multitude of sources, Times Reader scratches an itch I don’t have. I’ve been trying to find someone on campus here who reads the Times regularly in paper format to see what that person thinks of Times Reader, but so far no takers.

As a technological development, it’s interesting. I wouldn’t call it earth-shattering or anything. We’ll see what developments spring from this software as it evolves.

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