PressReader Review: Read (Almost) Any Newspaper on Your iPad or iPhone
Do you want access to newspapers and other publications from all over the world on your iPad or iPhone? PressReader is an app that allows you to have just that; the app has access to over 2,200 publications (newspapers and magazines) from 97 different countries in 54 different languages.
PressReader includes access to several big name publications such as USA Today, The New York Post, LA Times, The Washington Post, and the Seattle Times. In fact, I saw pretty much every publication I could ever care about in the app, except for two, those two being the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Despite the lack of my two favorite newspaper publications, I still think the app is very nice.
How does PressReader work?
PressReader essentially digitize’s every publication it maintains a partnership with and allows customers to either manually download or automatically download the publications they are subscribed to. Each publication acts very similar to the way a PDF file would act on your iPad or iPhone, so you can zoom in on the article, adjust text size, share articles on Twitter and Facebook, and save articles to services such as Instapaper and Evernote. However, unlike the Wall Street Journal’s iPad app, there isn’t any additional content such as videos or photo galleries in PressReader’s digital copies of the publications.
Features & other notes
PressReader’s navigation is also very nice, the app allows you to easily switch between sections of each publication via a navigation bar at the bottom, which they call SmartFlow. Additionally, anyone who has ever read a traditional newspaper will appreciate the ability to jump to a page where a particular story continues by simply clicking a link.
Reading articles with PressReader very closely resembles reading a regular old newspaper, it literally feels like reading a traditional newspaper but just on a tablet or smartphone, which means a lot of people who have been reading traditional newspapers for years will feel right at home using the app. The app also features on-demand audio for articles so you can listen to them too.
One thing we noticed in our review is that sometimes the photos would be grayscale and other times they were in color. This isn’t a huge deal and really didn’t affect our overall experience with the app, but something we thought would be worth noting.
Pricing
You can purchase individual publications with prices ranging from $0.99 to $3.99 per issue, or you can purchase a monthly subscription for $35/month, which will provide you to unlimited access to all publications — not such a bad deal, if you’re a news junkie.
We’ve included some screenshots of the app in action below.
Have you tried PressReader? What do you think?
