It’s 6:00 am on a Tuesday morning. Coffee just finished brewing in the kitchen of a Vancouver home and the owner, Paul, is reaching for his morning newspapers – all 1,200 of them, give or take a few.
This is a day in the life of a PressDisplay.com user.
“Ask the average person about their morning routine,” Paul says, “and they’ll tell you they get up and read the local newspaper before work. I can have the world’s news and my local news all available at any time – at home, at work or in an airport – anywhere I have a computer or smart phone. I even download five or six newspapers before I get on a plane so I have the latest editions with me on my flight.”
Paul is an English teacher and an enthusiastic user of PressDisplay.com, the world’s largest online newspaper and magazine kiosk. PressDisplay offers full-content digital replicas of local, national and international publications from 90 countries in 42 languages, accessible on computers, mobile devices and the latest eReaders. “The newspapers are not just similar to the printed versions,” Paul explains. ”They are absolutely identical to the paper ones in every way – from the local advertisements to the layout, except I read them on my computer and my hands don’t get ink on them.”
Some years ago, Paul was a subscriber to the digital editions of the Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers, both of which are powered by PressDisplay technology. Noticing the user-friendly interface and quality of the reading experience, Paul decided to venture further and get a subscription to PressDisplay.com, so that he could read the news from a world perspective.
Paul explains that once he was introduced to the world of newspapers online through PressDisplay.com, he told many of his friends to try the service and their reactions were similar to his initial doubts. “It’s like your grandmother saying, ‘ I don’t need a refrigerator; I can do fine with ice.’ I think we all resist new things a bit, until we suddenly are wondering how we ever managed without them.
But if you like reading the news from around the world, you need PressDisplay like you need the Internet.”
“And before PressDisplay,” Paul continues, “I spent more money on two local dailies than I spend on getting an endless number of newspapers from all over the planet. It is nice to care about the environment, but I’m saving money and getting a lot more for it at the same time.”
When browsing newspapers on PressDisplay.com, a reader can be notified of the latest papers as they are published, and also view the papers of an entire country in order of their release. Paul enjoys this feature, noting that “With PressDisplay, there’s a non-stop news cycle throughout the day. Newspapers used to be available once a day and that was all…whatever is published at 3:00 am in your city. The fact that a news reader in Canada, for example, can read European, Asian, African and Australian newspapers, often hours before they are available at the local newsstands, is both useful and empowering. And when Paul sees a link to a related story or to another resource (like a phone number, URL or email address), he can just click to access the active hyperlinks in the paper.
“I know what interests me, which parts of the world interest me,” Paul explains. Having visited Thailand, he enjoys reading the Bangkok Post; having travelled to Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post is interesting; the same is true for other newspapers from cities around the world where he’s lived, visited, or has friends and family. “The thing is,” he says, “With PressDisplay, I can just read the front page or a local story that I find interesting. I can’t buy a printed newspaper to just read three pages only to throw it away, but I can read a single article in hundreds of PressDisplay papers worldwide, then click on the next newspaper I want to read and not a single tree has died. I get to read about an earthquake in China from the local media and I can read the British take on US politics and elections or the Australian perspective on the war in Iraq. I can see what the Jerusalem Post think of the problems in the Middle East and then read the Arab News out of Saudi Arabia five minutes later. This is true for every world issue that interests me. Now I really have a sense of what’s going on and what’s important, not only from a US or Canadian perspective but a worldwide perspective.”
Like many people interested in world events, Paul used to rely on TV for his news before PressDisplay.com. However, with the availability of over a thousand international titles on demand, and the ease of browsing the interface for in-depth news, Paul says he has found “The TV is off a lot more than it used to be. 90% of my news, I get from PressDisplay.”
Paul reminds us that the first newspaper was published in 1604. “So why are people still reading newspapers as if they were 400 years old?” he asks. “Why are people reading newspapers the way people did half a century before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone? Reading newspapers has suddenly entered the 21st century, and people might want to consider updating their thinking.”
Paul, I couldn’t have said it better. 
Thanks for sharing!
Gayle
Tomorrow at the Monaco Media Forum, NewspaperDirect is unveiling its new PressReader apps for iPhone/iPod Touch and Blackberry – yes…you heard it – BlackBerry!
