The New Yorker for iPad Review

I finally bit the bone and bought a year subscription to The New Yorker on my iPad 2.  I resisted the purchase for so long because the weekly magazine is pricey and because getting magazines to work on an iOS device was an expensive hit-or-miss adventure that usually entailed hours of fiddling and re-starting and re-installing just to get a new issue to load.

With the update to iOS 5 and Newsstand, subscriptions are much better behaved once each magazine “upgrades” their delivery system to iOS 5 by releasing an App update.  December 2011 was a big month for updating publication Apps for Newsstand compatibility and the early results are promising.

Each week, I get a notification from Newsstand that a new issue of The New Yorker is ready for download.

Unfortunately, the new issues won’t download in the background, so I have to have this download screen active as a 175MB file downloads from the servers.

Once the new issue is downloaded, the magazine loads quickly and efficiently.

You can poke around the pages in a naturalistic and simple way that truly understands how you want to virtually interact with a magazine on an iPad.

The New Yorker has been an outstanding fount of excellent writing since 1925 and with an iOS subscription, you can read all the past issues of the magazine.

Read the magazine every week and you’ll get smarter by the minute.  Changing pages is as simple as an upward finger swipe.  The font is big and easy-to-read.  It’s a joyous experience to have such a well-designed magazine on the iPad.

There’s even a dedicated section for famous The New Yorker cartoons.

You can view all the cartoons with a few swipes.

Along with your iOS subscription comes access to archives.newyorker.com.  You can login and view all the previous issues of the magazine from your computer.

You can Way Back to 1925 and immerse yourself in modern American intellectual antiquity.

The New Yorker archives website claims you can also print past issues from your computer, but I couldn’t get a single page to print using the Google Chrome web browser on my Mac.

I highly recommend The New Yorker if you have an iPad 2. You can’t install the magazine on an iPhone — and I like that limitation because it allows The New Yorker to be a real magazine with a standard expectation of readable fluidity that proves The New Yorker knows how to deliver the best writing in your hands every single week.