I Love My ePaper!
On my morning ritual of reading TechCrunch, I was reading the NYTimes.com post on how their traffic is through the roof ever since they broke down their subscription based content model.
Although I subscribe to the Sunday NYTimes (in print), I had not been to their “new and improved” free website until after my daily ritual. Yes, it’s great…but I can’t help but be biased towards my Indian ePapers that I’ve grown to love.
The 2 leading Indian newspapers, The Hindustan Times and The Times of India, both have had a free ePaper available online for 2 years now (might have been longer, but I only jumped on this bandwagon 2 years ago).
Both their formats are similar and simple - the ePapers look exactly like the printed versions. Navigation is simple, almost like paging through the printed paper itself (ads and everything).
Some screenshots from today’s HT ePaper are below:
Easy navigation on the left as well as a set of Next/Previous/First/Last (not shown) buttons at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on any story, pops up a new window as shown below:
WYSIWYG at its best. What you see, in print, is really what you get online.
This is where the NYTimes “Today’s Newspaper” kind of falls short. Sure it has all the content, but no previews for the pages except the front page. The plus - it does have cooler sharing options (Digg, Delicious, etc.) and a good recommendation feature when you save a page (People who saved this articles also saved….yada, yada, yada).
In the Desi 2.0 world, where every online desi company seems to ripoff a page from an international counterpart (DesiMartini coverage in previous posts), it is refreshing to see an original implementation that has been in place for a long time.
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