I have, for many, many years, been a happy New Yorker subscriber. Their brand of long-form, intelligent written articles is increasingly rare in the American publishing landscape. Every other magazine seems content to give us a page or two, but the New Yorker will commission and print articles that sometimes require more than one sitting, and that’s just fantastic (The Atlantic and Harper’s still do this, too, but beyond them I’m at a loss for another US publication that does).

The New Yorker, too, has done some pretty interesting things digitally, at least up to now. They offered their entire archive on CD and DVD, and then on a hard drive, and finally online; in none of these cases was the product poorly-scanned and haphazardly OCR’d text — instead, the New Yorker provided full-page scans of entire issues, complete with vintage ads, all the way back to the beginning of time.

It’s a wonderful thing, I tell you.

What I’ve been waiting for, though, has been a real digital companion for my New Yorker subscription. I travel quite frequently, and always end up with 2 or 3 issues in my bag — maybe I’m partway through a long Sy Hersh piece in one issue, and want to catch up on the fiction from another, or whatever. The New Yorker is a weekly, too, so issue proliferation is a problem around the house — you don’t want to accidentally discard an issue without being sure you’ve read all you want to read!

I had high hopes for the New Yorker when I first heard that publications would be available on the Kindle, but those hopes were quickly dashed. Some numbskull at Conde Nast decreed that (a) the full text wouldn’t be available on Amazon’s device; and (b) no pictures would be present at all; and (c) the cost would be greater than a print subscription. Add to this the fact that a walled-garden digital subscription is by definition a rental — Amazon can zap your back issues at any time! — that you can’t share (no more “hey, read this!”), and it starts to look like a very bad deal indeed.

Today, the net is abuzz with the introduction of the New Yorker iPad app, which at first blush comes much closer to the mark. Appaarently, each new issue will have an iPad edition, complete with full text, all the pictures, all the cartoons, and the whole nine yards. That’s a great idea. What ruins it, and with it the New Yorker’s digital strategy, is that apparently the same numbskull is still handling pricing: Each iPad issue is $5, still contains a boatload of ads, and there is no provision for discounting or bundling for existing print subscribers. (Who, I note, retain access to the clunky web experience mentioned above for the whole of the archive.)

The New Yorker is a great magazine, but I can’t imagine buying even a great magazine TWICE. This is what the music industry wanted us to do (pay multiple times to play a song at home, on our iPods, in our cars, as ringtones), and it’s what the book-and-magazine industry would like to dupe us into.

I say bollocks. For now, if I want to carry back issues with me in digital form, I guess I’ll be printing a whole bunch of PDFs, because FUCK this iPad pricing model.