I felt a burst of joy when I logged in and saw for the first time the new digital edition of The New Yorker. It looks good and it works. The ads are still there — good, the magazine needs the revenue. The simulation of page-turning has a calming effect. You can easily print stuff to read later — while waiting for BART, say. You can easily go from the table of contents to the articles. You can easily look in back issues.
In Beijing I read The New Yorker online (the free stuff). Mail from America to China is so slow and error-prone it was pointless to have stuff forwarded. It felt fine. Sure, I couldn’t read some of the articles but there was plenty of other stuff to read. My subscription felt worthless. Now it doesn’t.
Maybe magazines aren’t dead.
More When I tried to read an article, big problems arose. 1. It wouldn’t work with Firefox, no matter how many times I reopened it. 2. After reading several pages with internet Explorer, it got into a state with two pages superimposed, making the whole screen unreadable. I couldn’t fix it. I gave up and went to the paper version.