NewspaperDirect Opens Up Beta Site For Limited Time

NewspaperDirect http://www.newspaperdirect.com has announced access, for a limited time, to its web-based display of newspapers in their original print format.

The reading URL as I found it was http://test.newspaperdirect.com/servlets/catalog/member . I looked at this URL in Mozilla, Opera, and IE, and in each of those browsers the list of newspapers on the left was corrupted and difficult to read. The only way I could make it readable was to toggle on the "user mode" in Opera, which removed most of the text formatting.

Newspapers are listed by country and by language. (There are over 90.) Pick one and click on it. In the right frame a graphic of the first page will load. A series of icons across the top of the screen let you page forward, page backward, jump to a specific page (the number of pages in the newspaper is listed at the top of the page, along with the page number you are currently viewing), or view a single page a framed frame with a set of thumbnails on the left and page views on the right.

If the view of the pages aren't clear enough for you, you can also zoom in and out. I found the pages of the papers I viewed a little difficult at 110% magnification but easy to read at 128%. I appreciated the fact that the paper pages were left apparently as-is, with ads included.

While 90 papers sounds like a lot, when it's papers worldwide it's really not that many. I'm sure they'll add more. This site is worth a look if only for the ease with which they have handled navigation issues and load times with large graphic files. Well done. Now if they could only fix the design that leads to that corrupted list...

Posted to Publications-Newspapers