The Times on Kindle disappoints
Posted on Sunday, April 24th, 2011 at 2:41 pm. #
I spent 99p the other day on a copy of The Times (of London), while in a hotel room in Las Vegas.
It was the Kindle Edition, a copy of The Times specifically created for Amazon’s small and well-formed e-book reader. Looking forward to some reading for later, I clicked the link to buy a copy of the newspaper, and with customary Amazon user-interface excellence, had a copy of the newspaper on my Kindle within twenty seconds.
It’s supposed to be the future, this: electronic versions of newspapers, delivered wirelessly to small, handheld devices.
But if this is the future, then it’s rubbish.
The issue of The Times I read had three photographs in it. Just three. The front page photograph, of David Cameron rubbishing the AV system, was curiously within a story about adopting children: a story that didn’t mention Cameron at all. There were no other photographs surrounding their news content.
The Times on the Kindle is broken up into sections; but imperfectly. The court news is within the “Obituaries” section, which was curious; and all of the T2 section was lumped together, so we had long-form articles alongside reviews of new plays and a daily recipe (without a photograph, naturally).
The T2 section also enclosed the only other two photographs in the entire edition: one photograph accompanying the travel article (of somewhere snowy); the other, a photograph of an artist being interviewed by the newspaper, oddly squashed into the wrong ratio, and only displaying the top half of his face.
There are more peculiar errors. The letters section (which also contains other articles, naturally, not just letters) insists on not giving any of the letter-writers any capital letters at all, while still doing so for place-names. Each article is accompanied by a word count, which is rendered entirely useless by the Kindle’s display of the comparative length of an article on the screen anyway; the leading article had a reference to a page number as “(see XX)”, and various photograph captions were tacked onto the end of articles as a bizarre afterthought. Typing errors also crept in, with one article starting with the word for a door which is slightly open, rather than a small glass container for jam.
The Times is supposed to be the finest newspaper in the world; and, for UK users, the Kindle edition of The Times is the best-selling newspaper for the device. This ought to be Amazon’s flagship product, helping them flog more newspapers and open up their reading device to new audiences; and it should be News International’s flagship product too, helping them achieve the future of their product with just one-click. It is neither.
The Times on the Kindle looks like a bad use of copy/paste rather than a properly designed product. I find it difficult to believe that Amazon, The Times’s editor, or News International are happy with the product. I’ll certainly be unlikely to repeat my purchase.
Interesting. Just the other day I was thinking about buying a Kindle, for me newspapers would be one of the biggest draws. I like the format of papers, I just don’t like the akwardness of a newspaper, so electronically it’d be great.
This has put me off buying a Kindle for now…!