Let’s face it, The Guardian’s online version isn’t great. It appears to be stuck in the age of the First Internet, much like earlier versions of the BBC’s website. Compare this to the recently relaunched New York Times, and you’ll see the difference.

However, in 2003, The Guardian launched their Digital Edition, which provides exact digital renderings in PDF and text of The Guardian. See the demo.

The Digital Edition allows people to browse through The Guardian section by section, and page by page, clicking on articles that may be of interest. The text of each article appears, and you can read this and/or download a PDF or press cutting. It’s an innovative solution to the problem of reading a newspaper online. But it’s not the correct solution: when you’re online you behave differently and you access information differently.

Look at the front page of The Guardian in the demo and you’ll see the problem. Apart from the headline of the main article, everything else is illegible. The teaser articles at the bottom of the page don’t link to the full content, so you have to resort to using the navigator on the left hand side column. That’s of course providing that you were sufficiently interested to poke about randomly, which is a contradictory possibility.

An alternative is to download the PDF. One page at a time, then scroll up and down as you read each article. This is lunacy. Even more so when the article you are reading appears on facing pages.

Later this month, The Herald will be launching a digital edition. It too will be a facsimile of the printed version, but requires the download of Press Reader, an application that provides navigation, searching and full-text versions of the content. It includes facilities to zoom in and out, scroll up and down, to read the content. Great. Except, once again, it’s the wrong solution.