The Spectator [Kindle Edition]

Face it, in its current form the Kindle is never going to be a great platform for reading most magazines. You certainly wouldn't dream of reading any publication where one of the main selling points is its photographic content. I can't see Vogue, Hello, National Geographic or Homes & Gardens ever taking off on device which can only offer black and white, e-ink facsimiles of photographs. Even publications that are less reliant on imagery are going to be a hard sell on the Kindle. One of the pleasures of picking up most magazines is the combination of words and pictures; in fact the content of many magazines simply wouldn't pass muster without the images that accompany the text.

There are however, a few exceptions to this rule and The Spectator is one of them. If any magazine came ready made to be read on the Kindle then its 'The Speccy'. Beyond a handful of cartoons and the odd image of an artwork, the only pictures in the print version of the magazine are found in advertisments. Since the latter are omitted from the Kindle version very little is lost in the conversion from printed page to e-ink.

The articles, as they're never intended to rely on the support of images or graphics and which are unchanged from the print version, lose none of their impact on the Kindle. The straightfoward layout of the printed magazine (i.e. articles following each other consecutively with very few breaks or sidebars) also lends itself to easy conversion to the Kindle.

There is the odd niggle about formatting. 'Spectator Notes' and the 'Diary' for example, could both do with the insertion of blank lines to delineate between sections. On the whole however, each edition (and I've subscribed for nearly two months now) scans smoothly once you get used to some slight rejigging in the running order of articles compared to the printed version.

Some readers may miss the cartoons. Personally I always found them to be a mixed bag and I'm not that sorry to see them left out, but equally I can't see why they have neen omitted. As they're nearly all small, pen and ink and black and white efforts they should translate easily to e-ink. There may be copywrite issues at work but whatever the reason its a bit of poor showing to leave them out entirely.

If you're not a fan of politics, finance or reasonably high-brow arts coverage then The Spectator, whether printed or electronic, will probably not appeal. The same applies if you're not keen on reading content predominantly written from a right of centre perspective. If however, you want some thoughtful writing on UK politics, society and the arts and you want it delivered to you weekly where ever you are in the world then The Spectator on the Kindle pretty much ticks every box. At £ 2.99 per month, advert free, its pretty decent value too.

One of the USPs that convinced me to buy a Kindle in the first place was the ability to have magazines sent to my portable device wirelessly and at a lower cost than the paper-based equivalents. Unfortunately the reality is that a lot of Kindle based magazines provide less content and only a small cost saving when compared with their traditional formats. However, after reading The Spectator for several months now, I am very happy to say that this magazine is one of the exceptions. The recent firmware update to the Kindle (latest version) makes navigating the sections even easier than before. As for the content, this contains most of the same articles as the standard print editions, but in particular it is the lack of adverts that makes this a more enjoyable companion on my daily commute to work. Being able to clip articles and Tweet highlights are two novelties that haven't yet worn off. The political tone of the writers is generally right of centre, which may or may not be to people's tastes, but then the free trial subscription should help them to decide.

This is a review of the Spectator magazine as it appears on the Kindle, not of the magazine content.

The magazine arrived promptly every Friday, seamlessly downloading to my Kindle.

I was looking forward to reading this magazine on the Kindle & it was the first subscription I bought once my Kindle arrived. Unfortunately, it does not read in an interesting way. As you open the magazine, it arrives at the first page of the first article. I then felt that so as not to miss any articles that I needed to read the magazine in a linear fashion, like a book. It was difficult to read as I would have hoped, for instance I would have liked to be able to read first the articles that interested me the most, but the menu structure makes this too difficult.

I'm not entirely sure that the magazine format suits the Kindle, unless some work could be done on the menu system. Perhaps the magazine could open to a menu first, showing the various sections, but also detailing under each section the various articles. Each article could then display a tick or progress bar to show what has been read.

I am disappointed in this format, as I was very much looking forward to reading magazines on my Kindle.