Electronic Nature

So in a rare case in which online marketing copy actually turns out to be worth reading, I've managed to score a free one-year subscription to the electronic version of Nature. It was the usual deal--answer a survey (Do you subscribe? Why not? Oh... Too expensive? Yeah, we get that a lot...) for the privilege.

This makes me happy. I used to have a subscription to the print edition, but let it lapse a while ago. It's not cheap, and I really only had so much time to read it, so it started seeming like a waste after a while--money better spent on baby's new shoes and so on.

The first issue to which I have access arrived today. I can report that the electronic edition downloads page by page on demand in impressive resolution and bit depth, using a custom reader which is kinda Acrobat-like (it's the NewsStand service, if any of you have seen this--believe you can also get The Times this way). And it's every page of the print edition, in the same layout.

No, you can't quite leaf through it as conveniently as you can a real-live magazine, but at the low, low price of free, I'm down with this.