With TimesSelect having ended, all of the NYTimes is available. That's changed since the Slate column was written.

I have missed the skimability of printed newspapers for ages, but I gave them up because I got tired of subscriptions where I couldn't call and complain about a missing home delivery until long after I had gone to work; I wanted them when I first got up, as part of my wakeup ritual.

Your eyes could skim an entire pages in seconds, pick up snatches of headlines and keep on going while absorbing lots of tidbits that added up to an awareness of events that can't be matched by any puny display. Web news won't be as good until a wall display can put an entire folded out double page of newspaper on show all at once.

In the meantime, as a stopgap, I have learned to click on far more google news headlines links than I intend to read, and then ruthlessly snap thru the tabs, reading just the headlines and first paragraph, then closing them before I have actually digested that -- and if my mind realizes seconds later that I should have read more, I use the "recently closed tabs" feature to resurrect the story. It's as close as I can get to skimming, where you skim and digest later and snap your head back to that last headline or even turn the page back.

This is a good piece about an important subject. Well done.

reading the times -- or any other newspaper -- online is like watching a ballgame through a knothole; the field of view is too small. there's nothing much a website can do about that except wait for the newspapers to shrink themselves down to an 8 x 10 page -- a process that is well under way.

I think RSS gets you some of the way toward the kind of skimmability you want. The problem is that, for commercial reasons, most publications like the Times (and Salon) prefer to give you just hed and deck in their feeds. So you're skimming a headline list, where what you really want is hed, deck and the first 2-3 paragraphs (which is what you'd read if your eyes were scanning the paper page). This is about the level of summary Salon puts (used to put?) on its "non-premium" teaser pages. Put that much in an RSS feed and I think you'd have the ideal skimming mode. Because RSS has one big advantage over reading the dead-tree edition: it keeps track of what you've skimmed and what remains unskimmed...

Then subscribe and support their efforts. How you can list the benefits and then state you'll "never go back" is ridiculous.

I'm about as web-obsessed as they come, a twenty-something running an ADD-fueled click/scroll/scan from Wikipedia to nytimes.com to google reader ad infinitum.

But I still cherish my daily reading of the print Times. There's just no comparison on the web. Online sites are great for targeting stories you're specifically interested in, but what about the stories I don't know I'm interested in until I see the headline? Only a casual flip through the paper can deliver that.

Or what about the stories I'm really not interested in, but maybe should be? I don't feel the same pangs of guilt skipping over a probably-very-important story about turmoil in Pakistan when it's just a link on the web. In print form I'll at least get a paragraph or two of international context before I go back to my yuppie stories in the Style section.

Plus, it's a great excuse to get out of the office/house for 45 minutes to go sit in the park.

In my mind, it's $650 well spent.

(Have any print-edition fans tried Times Reader http://www.nytimes.com/timesreader/ ? I use Linux so I can't, but I'm wondering if it can at least come close to the print version?)

I have been downloading the NYT print version for years from newsstand.com. All the great pix, everything just as it appears daily. I still get to settle down with the Sunday Times and go through the sections at a leisurely pace. No paper to recycle.

Try it.

Good content in this article.

Web presentation could use some work.

Opera presents your black text on brown background as an essentially unreadable dark mass. I needed to select the text to be able to read it.

Guess I'll just buy Salon's dead-tree version, eh? :-)

-Les

It is terrifying to think this would count for anyone as substantial thinking on this subject.

My dear Mr. Farjoo,

Yes! Yes! And my small Brooklyn Apt. with it's (now counting) 25 boxes full of New York Times editions with circled articles yet to be extracted all cry an exuberant yes! A woman with extensive formal education to the graduate level, I have gleaned more from reading the NYTimes than all my scholarly studies combined. And the photographers. The photographers! At least 1/2 of the 25 boxes have editions saved strictly for the purpose of scanning the photos (pre-NY Times on line) and blowing them up for framing! Why, I have thought to myself, if everyone actually READ the Times daily, this world would be transformed. Transformed I tell you!

Just one caveat. Please see the related URL for an hilarious post script to my letter.

I miss the days of cassettes when it comes to making a mix-tape. And I sometimes miss bicycles that you braked by pushing backwards on the pedals. I really miss Jerry. You get the drift. Those things really are a thing of the past.

I understand Manjoo writes a column about the latest advances in technology, and perhaps dead-tree technology can be perceived as quaint, but is a eulogy for the Gray Lady really in order? Or should we all get rid of our favorite ink pens and acid-free paper and stop using stamps to send letters and cards through the post office? Do schoolkids need to stop learning how to write in cursive? And, maybe most importantly, do we need to stop worrying about whether we can tackle the Thursday through Sunday NYTimes crossword puzzles using a pen when we should use a pencil?