New Yorker Online Subscription

March 15, 2011 6:01 AM

Since the magazine hasn't answered my email I'll ask y'all. I was thinking about purchasing the online subscription to the New Yorker so I can read their archives. Anyone know what format the archived articles are available in? Can you only read online or do they allow you to download so you can read stuff on your device? Epub? Pdf?
posted by zzazazz to computers & internet (7 answers total)

You can only read the articles while online. It uses javascript and pictures, as far as I can tell. It's not a downloadable format.

They did also sell a complete New Yorker CD that goes up until 2005; I don't know if/how they ever update it.
posted by lesli212 at 6:10 AM on March 15, 2011

We let our online subscription lapse a couple of years ago in part because it was a pain in the ass to read. You could only read it online, and because of the javascript, it made "paging" through the articles pretty irritating.
posted by rtha at 6:18 AM on March 15, 2011

The digital subscription is awful unless you have a really huge screen. It's a two page spread and you can turn pages and zoom. Unreadable without zooming, but you can't move the spread-- have to zoom out and click on another part of the spread. On my 15 inch screen, it was very difficult to read articles, due to the column layout. Had to zoom in and out all the time, and it wasn't a very fast system. You do get all pictures, including ads.

Maybe the iPad app is good?
posted by acidic at 6:43 AM on March 15, 2011

I had an online subscription to the New Yorker, but I recently decided to upgrade to get a full subscription so that I could read it on my commute.

As lesli212 says, it is images of the pages in the magazine with javascript. But you can get something like PDFCreator and print the images out to PDF. This is even the case for current, subscription only articles.

I didn't have a problem reading it on my 12 inch laptop screen, since you can zoom in and navigate fairly easily.

I believe you can get a free preview and see how you like it.
posted by hgcrpd at 7:35 AM on March 15, 2011

Thanks, those were all helpful answers.
posted by zzazazz at 10:35 AM on March 15, 2011

The archive is clunky, cumbersome, overly-complicated, and generally a pain-in-the-ass to use, but access to all those old articles (with the terrific old ads on the page and the doodles and cartoons and all, exactly as they were way back when) can be worth the hassle.

It's geared to reading on the screen in the archive's awkward two-page reader, but, on a Mac at least, it's relatively easy to print articles as .PDFs and then have access to them that way. (I *never* read anything in the archive browser.) Lately I've been printing articles to .PDFs and then reading them on my iPad (via the GoodReader app), which is a nice experience.
posted by buriedpaul at 12:26 PM on March 15, 2011

3rding that it's worth it if you print them to PDFs and have a good way to view PDFs, like an iPad or hacked Nook. Like MacOS, Ubuntu does this right out of the box. If you leave the ads in, the resulting file is usually in the 100-120MB range. (Excluding double issues.)
posted by SpiffyRob at 1:34 PM on March 15, 2011