The IT Nerd

I’m a news hound and on my iPhone are a variety of news apps to feed my addiction to news keep me informed about current events. However, while that covers big news outlets like CNN, CBC or the BBC, local news outlets may not have apps for you to install. Or if they do, you may end up with a pile of news applications on your phone occupying space.

Enter PressReader. This is what I like to call the news app to rule them all. It provides access to 2300 Publications from 100 countries in 55 languages. Plus it’s available on the web, iOS, Android, Windows, Kindle, and BlackBerry. I took a look at the iOS version and fell in love with it immediately for the following reasons:

• PressReader has a high-definition PDF rendering engine and SmartFlow “intelligent” horizontal news presentation which allows smartphone and tablet users to read newspapers and magazines lust like a newspaper or magazine. The text renders quickly and is sharp on my iPhone 5s and is easy to navigate. It looks even better on an iPad that I borrowed to see what it would be like on a tablet.  Here’s a picture of what The Guardian looks like on my iPhone 5s:

• I could find almost any newspaper I was looking for. For example I have it set up to deliver the Toronto Star, The Globe And Mail, The Guardian among other newspapers and I grabbed a couple of magazines to boot. Setting this up was dead simple and I am blown away by the amount of news and magazine content that is available. However, I could not find the Financial Times or The Telegraph. Being from the United Kingdom, that was slightly disappointing. But new titles are being added all the time, so I hope they eventually show up.
• One handy feature is that  I could download various publications to my iPhone and read them without an Internet connection. That’s great if I’m on a plane or on the subway.
• Another handy feature is that the app can READ the paper to you. That’s handy if you want to get the news while you’re driving or doing something that requires you to not be reading the paper at the time.

The app itself is free, but to get the most out of the app you have to pay for the newspapers and magazines that you want to look at. PressReader has several options on that front:

Pay As You Go: 

• $0.99 an issue
• Access to 90 back issues
• 15 monitoring alerts
• no auto downloads

Personal:

• $29.95 a month unlimited
• Access to 90 back issues
• 30 monitoring alerts
• 5 auto downloads

Corporate: 

• $99.95 a month unlimited
• Access to 90 back issues
• 100 monitoring alerts
• 10 auto downloads

Professional: 

• $199.95 a month unlimited
• Access to 90 back issues
• 300 monitoring alerts
• 20 auto downloads

The last three options allow you to access anything in their catalog and once you sign up, you can authorize up to five different devices to view publications from. Now some people will say that they can read papers online for free. But that assumes the content is available online, and it’s not behind a paywall, or you only get a limited amount of articles for free and you have to pay for the rest. Contrast that with PressReader where all the content  is licensed, so you get all the content you could ever want in one place with none of those restrictions. To me, that’s hard to beat. If price is truly an issue,  PressReader has a free news aggregator feature on the PressReader website and on smartphone apps which gives you the top stories of the day.

So, what’s my bottom line? If you love to read the news and you want to get all the content that want to feed your habit, consider PressReader and a personal subscription. It covers any platform you want and gives you all the content that you desire and delivers an excellent reading experience. It’s a winning formula.