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.

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.