A couple of weeks ago, I finally succumbed to the Star Tribune’s eEdition come-on. I already pay full price for a print subscription, but the yearly add-on was so cheap — $5 once you cashed in a $10 gas card — that I figured why not. As a PiPress E-Edition subscriber for almost two years (they don’t deliver to my part of Minneapolis), it’s a good time for a side-by-side review.

First, yeah, on some level eEditions suck, combining all the dynamism of print with the readability of a website. The visual challenge is huge: An unfolded “paper” Strib has as much real estate as a 32-inch monitor. Even a single page is 24 inches diagonal; you may have a desktop screen that big, but you’re screwed on a laptop — and oh yeah, a paper is oriented vertically while most monitors are horizontal.

And when the Great IPad Revolution comes, these things may be even dorkier than they seem now.

Then again, eEdition use is climbing — the PiPress now counts up to 47,000 per weekday, and the Strib is at 25,000. True, e-papers are often a print subscription throw-in, or foisted off on schools, and the Strib numbers are a bit inflated because they dragooned their staff e-ward after ending print distribution in the newsroom.

For potential subscribers, cost is key, obviously, and it matters a lot if you already pay for print. As the Strib example shows, a year’s worth of eEditions can a print subscriber cost less than a movie ticket; the same is true of the PiPress. For non-subscribers, the list price of a 365-day PiPress subscription is $58.50; the Strib, $104, which is about half the print price. But I’ll bet you can find a better deal if you ask.

Advantages
So why even consider them? Three basic reasons.

First, newspaper layouts still rock. We all know what link-laden, ad-heavy cacophony the Strib’s home page is; the PiPress’s, on the other hand, is stultifyingly dull. Print is where stories and photos pop, where headlines catch your eye, where serendipity has been honed. Even if an e-edition is only methadone to print addicts, it’s better than going cold turkey.

Second is convenience. It’s just plain nice to “see” the paper no matter where you are (as long as there’s an Internet connection). It’s also nice when the carrier doesn’t get there before breakfast, though I don’t want to oversell this — the PiPress promises “delivery” by 6 a.m., the Strib 5:30 a.m. It shouldn’t take that long, considering newsrooms sent PDFs to their printers in the wee hours.

Third is search. And while eEditions are static PDFs, they do offer web-like keyword print-edition searching. It’s not as good as it could be; the PiPress’ only go back 30 days (though that’s two weeks longer than the free online archives) and the Strib’s is a mere 14 days.

Still, if you’re trying to find a print version of a story, the e-subscription is very handy. Many more Twin Citians read their papers on pulp than online, and I find it helpful to search the version most people see.

And the PiPress offers one archiving feature I love: you can look at any print replica going back to November 2007. (I’m badgering Strib digital boss Jason Erdahl for a similar feature.) PiPress circulation V.P. Andrew Mok says e-subscribers will soon get access to historic papers — the week of Lincoln’s assassination, the Titanic sinking, etc.

Reading stories
The two dailies rely on different e-paper platforms that, to a certain extent, mirror their web personalities. The Strib’s Olive platform is slicker but less intuitive; the PiPress’s Technavia is utilitarian but more efficient.

On either platform, it’s easy to see layout, headlines and photos in the full-page view. I can also read subheads on my desktop, but not my 15-inch MacBook Pro. Story text? As George H.W. Bush once said, “Not gonna happen.”

Reading stories reveals a key difference between the papers’ approach. The PiPress’ is straightforward — in the single-page view (you can also look at a double-page layout), click anywhere on the story and text automatically appears in a right-hand frame. It’s not all that pretty — if the story jumps to an inside page, the photos, credits and cutlines break up the text — but it’s obvious, quick, and I’m used to the quirk. You double-click or hit a menu button to see a zoomed-in version of the page element in the right-hand frame.

Reading a Strib e-story demands a bit more. A single click zooms in and zooms out. The Strib’s zoom-in annoys me because it doesn’t auto-size to the story borders. This pushes you toward double-clicking, which will display the text cleanly with no breaks — but in a pop-up window you have to close; inefficient.

If you want to read everything without frames and pop ups, you can simply make the page as wide as your screen. This is obvious for the Strib (menu button), not so for the PiPress (a series of double-clicks). Of course, maximizing width means you can’t see the full page length; I only get a third of a PiPress page, which all but rules out this approach. The Strib’s is better; about 40 percent of a page, though on a laptop, the text is on the edge of being too small. I still chose the pop-up option more frequently.

(One other Strib bug if you’re a MacBook user; two-finger scrolling is jerky; for precision, you have to hold down the click button, or use Olive’s kludgy scroll bar.)

I know this all sounds kind of dreadful, but even if eEditions only provide 25 percent of print’s reading pleasure and 50 percent of the serendipity, I wind up reading 80 percent of the stories I do in print, in far less time.

Which edition?
Both papers produce zoned print editions where stories and emphasis change depending on where you are in the Twin Cities. The PiPress’ eEdition is the St. Paul final. The Strib offers you all five zones in each day’s e-copy. I found the repetition annoying to scroll through until Erdahl explained there’s a table of contents on the second tab in a left-frame. Again, not intuitive, but once I knew about it, problem solved — and it’s sometimes interesting to see the zoned differences.

When you’re looking for a specific section, the PiPress drop-down menus are easier to use. Both papers offer tables of contents that jump you to a specific story; the Strib’s include the first several words of each story.

Bells and whistles
Both papers offer translations, using Google Translate. That means the translations are only as reliable as Google Translate ever is.

Some links within stories are hot — for example, you can email reporters with one click — but links in display ads are not.

E-subscribers get an email each day alerting them when the issue is “live.” I like the PiPress’ because it highlights the top three stories on the front page; Erdahl says the Strib is considering similar distinctiveness.

By the way, the eEditions don’t just allow publishers to double-dip in print layout work their staffs have already done; they provide a web-side double-dip too.

The Strib tries to give you some web timeliness by providing breaking news links in a left-side frame. They also slide a web ad in a right-side frame; thankfully, it looks like they ditched a horizontal banner that made it even harder to read a vertical page.

The eEdition also helps web stats; Erdahl says 1.7 percent of the Strib’s page views in January came from eEdition clicks; that represents 1.7 million page views that month.