When I bought my Kindle Fire last January1 it came with a free six month subscription to the Washington Post. Turned out this was not totally altruistic, the same dude that owns the Kindle company, owns the newspaper too, so he’s hoping I would subscribe once that trial period ran out.
Well, I fell for it. I did, but only because they used the same model as satellite radio did, another 6 months for like the price of the one month. When that ran out I thought I might try a different major paper, the failing New York Times maybe? How about the Boston Globe? But all the biggies were priced 2 to 2-1/2 times the cost of the WaPo’s $3.99 a month. Jeff beat me down, I had become used to reading the Post, so I gave them him my credit card and subscribed.
But the experience has been wearing thin. My big problem was they way it updates. You pick up an actual paper and you get what you get, but electronically with the Post you’ll be reading along article after article, swiping to advance and all of a sudden you’d find yourself 5 articles back. What happened? You’d guess that maybe something new has been added in front and maybe it is newer news. Nope. WTF?
You know when something has been updated on the “paper” because a small semi-transparent balloon appears over whatever you are reading to let you know. The only way to get rid of the balloon is to click on it. And instead of trusting you to remember to go looking, you are taken all the way back to the very first article.
Today I decided that I had enough and decided to just go back to getting my news from my Google News feed. It’s free and I’m a cheapskate at heart. I cancelled subscription.
It wasn’t easy and that is a whole other post…