Customer Reviews

The Boston Globe

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Pros:
Electronic delivery

No paper to recycle

Sections are listed and presented for navigation

Entire paper is searchable

You can keep as many editions as you like (depends on your Kindle's storage).

You can resend any edition (back one week) via your Amazon Kindle account management page. Great if you accidently delete an edition.

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Cons:
Less content than paper edition (no comics, no classifieds, no coupons, few pictures, few obituaries).

No weather report or forecast

No league standings for ANY sports - an inexcusable omission!

Articles are not in the same order as paper edition

Some article appear twice in the same edition using different titles. Poor editing procedures.

Articles sometimes have programming codes left in them during the conversion process, again poor editing.

Boston Globe team can be late in delivering the Kindle edition (really, how hard can it be to deliver ONE computer file on time?)

Unusable web-links are sprinkled throughout articles. They do nothing but distract the reader. Probably residue left by the poor conversion and editing process.

You can't easily jump back an article if you inadvertently click past one. You have to either click back page-at-a-time (slow) or jump articles starting back from the section beginning (again slow). This can be quite a pain.

Amazon Kindle support isn't available until 9:00 AM EDT. This is a pain if Amazon's electronic delivery fails for the Boston Globe (happened to me once) and you need them to resend.

Hard to believe, but the Boston Globe's customer service department is unaware that they publish a kindle edition! Don't call them with delivery failures--they're completely clueless.

A recent change in the Kindle's format now has articles ending and beginning on same page rather than beginning on their own page as they did before. This makes navigation worse as it sometimes separates articles from their navigation links. Bad decision.

Price is too high at $9.99/month considering you're not getting everything the paper edition offers made worse by poor editing. I feel it should be closer to $5.

Overall it feels like the Boston Globe team takes the closest thing resembling an electronic edition and simply shoves it through the Kindle reformatting utility. It's apparent there's little effort to polish the Kindle edition.

I live in Boston and had been waiting for the Boston Globe to become available for the Kindle since mine arrived on December 4, 2007. I subscribed the first day I found out about it and have not been disappointed. I am not a big print newspaper fan, I find them environmentally unfriendly, dirty (think blank ink on hand), and they contain a lot of information I usually have no interest in (ads, sports, stock lists, etc.) so they are thicker than I need them to be and messy. I won't even take the two free papers offered at the subway on most days (the excellent Metro and the whiny bloggy Boston Now). On the other hand I find the web version of newspapers hard to drill down to find the articles that apply only to today - if you know the topic you can do a search but there's really no way to tell if I at least skimmed all the articles for the day.

Enter the Kindle edition which solves most of my complaints about the print and web edition of the Boston Globe, while all the material I am not interested in is still there it is easy to bypass and doesn't really cause any clutter or eat up resources (a few kb of disc space I guess). Some pictures are now beginning to appear too. The ads are gone (so unless you only buy the paper for the ads - some people do - you will be pleased). The Contents, Sections and Next Article layout is great. From the main page you can just skim all the headlines by hitting the next page button until you get to the end - and then you'll know you haven't missed any of today's headlines. If you want more detail you can select the headline link. You can then once finished reading the article (or deciding only to read some of it or none of it) easily hit the back button to return to the list, or if you've finished the article you can go forward directly to the next story (comes in handy in your favorite section if you know you want to read most articles there). The only thing that's missing is the comics and the death notices but you can read those on-line at the comic sites in the first case and the Globe's site in the case of death notices - if you really, really want to.

Good job.

The Boston Globe If you're looking for the real Boston Globe, unfortunately you won't get it here. The Boston Globe is my local newspaper, so I want the local news and reporting, not just the major articles. I'm used to seeing local high school sport information, box scores, etc in the sports section. Unfortunately you only get a few parts and pieces of the newspaper. Thanks, but that's not offering me any real value. If you ever change to offering the real newspaper, then I may be interested in subscribing.

I began receiving the Globe on my Kindle in October for $9.99/month. I subscribed not only because it is the regional paper, but also because this represented a cost savings over other papers such as the NYT. I have enjoyed it and consider the $9.99 to be well spent. But the Globe for Kindle will now jump to $14.99/month. A 50% price increase for *anything* is customer-unfriendly, but especially for the Globe Kindle version: on the Kindle, you do not get certain content such as comics, classifieds, or even the majority of photos in the paper. It is extremely unwise for the Globe to effect this sort of price hike without beefing up the Kindle content for the newspaper -- at the very least, the comics, which most people enjoy reading daily. Because of the new disparity between price and content, I will be canceling my subscription when my 6-month grace period under the old price expires. It is unfortunate, and I will miss receiving it on the Kindle; but the cost-benefit analysis does not pan out with a 50% price hike for the same pared-down content.

I start every morning with coffee and the Boston Globe on the Kindle, very convenient being able to read the paper with one hand. I scan all the national stories first- always first rate writing with no obvious media slant. But to be honest unless a story catches my eye right away I head to the sports section which includes all the print writers as well as the sports notes for baseball, football, basketball, etc. The Kindle version does not contain all the pictures and graphics of the print version but there does seem to be more than a year ago and I have not found the lack of graphs and pictures to be a detriment. I do subscribe to the local paper but I get my national news from the Globe. I have had a Globe subscription since I got my Kindle last summer and have been very happy with it.

I have been waiting for the Boston Globe to be a subscription on the Kindel and its finally here. I love it! I live in Upstate New York and have tried to find the paper and it's very hard to find even a Sunday edition. Now I get up in the morning and download the Boston Globe on my awsome Kindel and bam its there within 12 seconds. How about that!! No more calling Barnes and Noble and asking do you have a copy or any other retailer. The Sports page is excellent if you are a Boston fan of any kind you will love the editors columns. Also very informative on Business. I do miss the photo's but that's fine I get the paper each day as I have my cup of Joe and enjoy it on my Kindel. Also reading way more of the articals and not just skimming through the paper. A very big plus!! Get the Globe, you won't be disappointed:)

After trying the Globe on Kindle for 6 weeks, I went back to the Newsstand electronic edition.

There were good things about the Kindle edition: it's much more portable, and I wouldn't need to carry a laptop and arrange for an internet connection when I was on the road. It's easy to read on the no-backlight Kindle screen. The organization of the paper is pretty good.

But the Globe's Kindle edition needs much improvement. It's almost like getting the newspaper in paperback book form, and nobody has the time to read or even skim through 700 pages every day. You can jump around with headlines, but often they aren't descriptive enough. Daily columnists are never identified, so you have to guess which headline takes you to Joan Vennochi or Bob Ryan.

Why would you pay for the electronic edition instead of reading the free website? For me, it's to get the Globe's presentation of everything it has to offer. The front page has important news at a glance, but you also see features and photos you might never read except for their placement. You can tell quickly what stories are most important, and read a few sentences or half the story. On a newspaper website, I get lost in clicks and side stories, and after a half dozen stories I can hardly find your way back to the beginning. I never spend as much quality time with [...] as I do with the paper. The Kindle edition needs to do more to provide the reading advantages that are worth paying for.

The Newsstand electronic edition gives me the navigation and appearance of the printed paper. I can read it anywhere I go without all the trash, and it's cheaper than the printed paper too. The Kindle edition was fun to try and easier on the eyes, but after a long trial I preferred the other system. If they improve the Kindle headlines and include some vital information (like who is writing the columns!), I'll give it another try.

The Globe on Kindle, minus sports scores, comics, television etc. was priced perfectly at about $10/month. I was a loyal subscriber but this price hike is ludicrous and poor judgement on their part. The Financial Times & New York Times, while overpriced, at least had additional redeeming qualities to justify being a bit pricier than the Globe. Now that the Globe has gone to $15.00/month they can kiss my subscription goodbye. Too bad.

I am an extremely tech savy person, thus I had high hopes for the kindle. After I had shown interest in the device by borrowing a friends to read a couple of books on a trip last fall, I was given my kindle by my wife for Christmas. She has been encouraged that it would be a way to keep current with the papers when I'm away on business travel. But sadly, after two different attempts of news delivery (a short "USA Today" trial and one month of the "The Globe"), I have given up on newspapers on the kindle.

I should state that the kindle itself is great and is already replacing the paperbacks I normally have in my case when I'm on the plane; but not so the newpapers. Frankly the network was too spotty to support daily downloads of the paper, so that hurt the experience (I travel outside the USA a good bit and my blackberry works most places, not so the kindle).

But more damning was that even when I did get it delivered to my kindle, in both cased the paper's format is not really friendly to kindle readers. It just is not easy to sit and browse/read the paper the way I do the physical one. The newspaper metaphor needs a great deal of work when mapped to this type of device.

The "broadsheet" format was developed over many years and well optmized for that physical media. The kindle developers have done an excellent job of mapping the book into this format. Not so the newspaper. Maybe the issue, is we the readers needs to be used to a different style of reading the paper. But I wonder.... it's worked for many, many years.

Plus in the case of The Globe, it's missing a great deal of content - so the whole reason to have it on my kindle (to keep up), can not be currently supported.

It's good enough that I was able to cancel my physical subscription. Yes, it IS missing some content, but most of what I actually read in the paper is included in the Kindle version. Navigating is a little weird at first, but once you figure it out, it's quite easy. Overall this is very good, and at the price it was definitely worth it to me. I suspect that this type of delivery method is the future of newspapers within the next 5 to 10 years.