34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent Addition To The Kindle!!
Fantastic newspaper for the Kindle. It is absolutely great to have the Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times and their excellent articles available for the Kindle. I'm actually amazed it took this long to become available to Kindle subscribers.
Why not 5 stars? No graphics, no pictures, and I would hope for a lower price for an electronic newspaper. I don't...
Published 13 months ago by A. Stagg
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
It's good enough, but it could be much better.
I've been using the 14 Day trial Kindle subscription to various newspapers (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times). I thought at first that most should be pretty equal in quality but was seriously mistaken.
Living in Los Angeles, I ended up choosing and keeping the Los Angeles Times subscription for it's coverage of...
Fantastic newspaper for the Kindle. It is absolutely great to have the Pulitzer Prize winning LA Times and their excellent articles available for the Kindle. I'm actually amazed it took this long to become available to Kindle subscribers.
Why not 5 stars? No graphics, no pictures, and I would hope for a lower price for an electronic newspaper. I don't think Amazon or the newspapers have thought out the economics of growing this segment of their industry. They are charging too much for a product that is less expensive to make. I still LOVE having the news on my Kindle, but these electronic subscription only SUPPLEMENT receiving the paper version. For families, there is not the traditional family Solomon-esque experience of splitting the morning or weekend paper among family members who all want to read the sports page. So, these subscriptions to the e-version should be discounted for people who actually subscribe to the local papers OR they should provide electronic FAMILY subscriptions.
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I live on the East Coast, read both the NY Times and Wash Post on the web, but was disappointed with both their Kindle attempts. Perhaps, their Kindle editions are finalized and published so early (between 4 to 6 am EST) that they can't include many of the stories found on their websites at the time most people start their days. It appears like both are a bit short on articles compared to their print or web editions. The LA Times Kindle edition, however, seems to have more timely headlines for the late morning commute (9 am EST). Also, their writing is solid, and coverage amazing. In addition to the hard news of world conflicts or the housing crisis, they mix in human interest stories like recent ones on the struggles of workaday classical musicians or archaeologists uncovering artifacts from ancient "green" Sahara. Definitely a keeper.
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I tried at least 5 newspapers on the Kindle, including New York Times and Washington Post, and settled on the LA Times a few months ago. The layout and navigation work well on the Kindle. It consistently arrives early. The quality of the writing and the breadth of coverage are both excellent. I would have given it a '5' - but the lack of graphics and photos is an obvious negative--especially when reading a story that refers to a graph that you have no way to see. Nevertheless, I highly recommend LA Times, especially to Californians who want substantial and original coverage of national events.
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The L.A. Times Whisperneted onto my Kindle today, Independence Day. What a bargain! And I am confident the venerable Founding Fathers would heartily approve. For pennies a day, I now have access to international news on every subject from the arts to the economy to the real state of the nation.
Talk about volume? There are roughly twice as many words in the Sunday edition than in the book I labored over for two years (available on Kindle). Think of that: readers receive at least the equivalent of a book to read each day. Why I could match Jefferson's library at Monticello in less than a year from just this one source.
Did I mention that the reading is relevant? After all, something like one in seven Americans live within an hour's drive of the L.A. Times Building. And Southern California is arguably the revolutionary center of the world in much the same way the Atlantic Colonies were in 1776. Of course, the L.A. Times is internationally recognized (Pulitzer Prize, yeah!) as one of the last real sources of news in a world that values entertainment to the exclusion of information. I'm one of those who believe, as did Ben Franklin, that a citizen has a duty to inform himself through a reliable newspaper.
Now I'm sure not everyone agrees with me that this is the Kindle Edition of the L.A. Times is the premier reading experience. But I have a hard time believing that anyone could read the important and entertaining articles I did today and not be heartily impressed.
I could spend hours a day with my Kindle just reading this newspaper. At a little more than a quarter a day, who could ask for more? (Well, photos, yeah.)
(One week later) Fast and Early Delivery. This is the fourth newspaper I've trialed on Kindle, and the most consistent delivery time. I'm an early riser, and the Times is ready before my coffee every morning so far.
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I've been using the 14 Day trial Kindle subscription to various newspapers (New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and Los Angeles Times). I thought at first that most should be pretty equal in quality but was seriously mistaken.
Living in Los Angeles, I ended up choosing and keeping the Los Angeles Times subscription for it's coverage of California news and Calendar section. However, I noticed a (very) significant difference in quality from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to the Los Angeles Times. The aforementioned newspapers rarely (almost never) have typos or grammatical symbols in their articles. The articles are nicely formatted and are very consistent. This is not the case with the Los Angeles Times. While the information is pretty much there for the Los Angeles times, it is very evident that there is a lack of quality in the Kindle edition. I want to like it and the articles are very relevant to me as resident of Los Angeles. The Kindle edition is maybe 80% there.
The editors of the LA Times need to put in more work into this Kindle edition to bring it more in line with their competition. Please look at the quality of the New York times and Wall Street Journal and try to match it (no typos, add pictures and charts, no formatting errors, etc). I'm still a subscriber to the Los Angeles Times but I have seriously pondered switching to either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal simply for the quality of both their articles and the quality of their Kindle editions (the only thing keeping me as an LA Times subscriber is the California section and the Calendar section in the newspaper). Hopefully the editors can put in the required effort to make this a quality publication. I definitely want to like it and would like to see it improve.
July 2, 2009
Did not see the LA Times Kindle edition fix the negatives mentioned above. I have canceled the subscription. Will probably subscribe if the LA Times staff puts the effort into fixing their Kindle edition.
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Downgraded by one star due to lack of photos and charts, but not too big a deal to me.
I find I read the paper MUCH more now that it's so easy to take with me just about anywhere. I feel good about not wasting paper, and not having to cart the paper out to my recycle bin. Plus, it never gets thrown under my car :)
The set up is very easy to navigate (at least on the K2). Push the 5-way key to the right to skip an article or use the page forward button to continue page-by-page. Use the table of contents to skip to a certain section of the paper, or even select a particular article using the section contents list.
I was getting the paper free using the Calibre program (which is a great companion to the Kindle, by the way) but it's so much easier to navigate through the paid version of the Times. With the free version, there is no convenient way to skip over a long article that you are not interested in - the ease of navigation a big advantage with the paid subscription. I enjoy the fact that the paper "magically" appears on my Kindle every morning without fail.
Content is well-written and comprehensive.
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Having been an intern at the Los Angeles Times in 2007 (before Sam Zell took over), I was excited to be able to start reading the paper in a form besides the Web site again. I ordered the first day I had my Kindle and was over the moon.
The stories are interesting and remind me of a great point in my career. I love the Column Ones and many of the great columnists. I get my national news and my stories out of Africa. Good interviews fill the Calendar section and I get to read my friends' stories.
But as months have passed, I find the editions becoming smaller and smaller. For being one of the most known papers in the world, it's becoming one of the smallest. For example, on Jan. 4, the Sunday New York Times (kindle edition) had 12,000-plus locations while the LA Times had 5,111. On Feb. 1, The Washington Post's Sunday edition had 8,500-plus while the LA Times had 4,892. Also, the LA Times doesn't have images where the NYT and the Post do.
With the announcement of the California section's death and move into the front section, it most likely means less of the national and world news I'm after and the local news Californians are after.
Plus, with the mass layoffs coming again, editing mistakes are bound to become more frequent than they are now. I'll likely cancel soon and go with the Washington Post until someone wrests the LA Times from Sam Zell's evil clutches.
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I am lovin' the LA Times as a news source. I like picking up information in an audio format, so I'm glad that this paper is available on Kindle, because it is NOT available from Audible.
I previously used Audible's NY Times digest as my preferred news source. It is read by a live person vs. the technology reader on Kindle. There are pros and cons to both. I like the live reader on Audible, but they don't offer the LA Times and I have requested it for many months.
I LOVE the digest format, but it's not offered on Kindle, at least not for the LA Times.
The Kindle technology reader is so-so. I like the "War Games" voice technology because I loved the movie, but it's not terrifically accurate. Gets many words and nomenclatures completely wrong. Doesn't read headlines and bylines with appropriate phrasing. I'm not sure if it is a learning program or not, i.e., will it improve its abilities in the short run? It went from "LA times period com" to "LA times dot com" overnight, but I haven't noted much improvement beyond that. It's promising, but still sub par.
Ideally, I'd like a choice of voices that sound more like live people AND a digest format option that can be expanded by section or by story to full coverage. AND I wish that someone would produce the Christian Science Monitor in audio format because it seems to be the least politically slanted source of news.
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Pretty easy to navigate. Excellent reporting, variety of content. Needs photos etc to get more stars from me but hey, it's very serviceable as it is now. I'm going to stick with it for a while.
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It's disappointing enough that there are no pictures or graphics in the electronic version of the L.A. Times. (How exciting it is, for example, to read about art, architecture and home decorating without illustrations.) But when I learn that the "special" sports sections featuring the first two Lakers' NBA Final games aren't downloaded with my subscription, I can't believe it!
Am I supposed to buy a second "hard" copy of the newspaper just to see the Times' coverage of the Lakers? Or should I read the paper for free on the tiny screen of my Apple iPhone? Amazon and Kindle, PLEASE get your act together.
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