The litter in littérateur. Ricky Opaterny on Books, Music, Art, and Sports

After having posted previously that the New Yorker digital edition would be a letdown based on my experience at the New Yorker Festival, I had a chance to try out the digital version on its Monday launch this week. The nice thing about the reader is that it caches the page previews, which allows you to quickly flip through the magazine with little delay. However, reading and printing are another story. Reading requires zooming in on the pages, and the responsiveness leaves a lot to be desired. Printing is a huge pain because you need to select each page you want to print individually. I tried selecting the entire Talk of the Town section, and the resulting printout was not properly formatted to print one magazine page on one 8.5×11″ page. Additionally, some pages are missing when you select groups of pages. I tried to print the entirety of this week’s magazine, and was only successful with about half of it—and that came only after waiting for 10 minutes for the print dialogue box to appear once the pages, supposedly, rendered. It looks like I’ll be going back to my own method of reading the New Yorker digitally. When I get each issue in the mail on Monday, I remove the staples, cut the magazine down the center, and drop the pages in my scanner’s paper feed tray. It can take up to 10 minutes to scan the whole thing, but I get a nice PDF file that loads and zooms instantly, can be printed quickly, and doesn’t require an Internet connection for viewing on my computer.