The Toronto Star recently came out with an ipad app, and they seem to be pushing it pretty hard, perhaps even prioritizing it over everything else.
The problem is that this renders some content inaccessible to people who don't have ipads.
If an ipad user tweets an article from the Star, it provides a link to the ipad version. If you're reading on a computer, it doesn't autodetect that and direct you to the web version, or provide a link at the bottom to the full version like many mobile websites do. The ipad link doesn't always provide the full text of the article, and (so far, at least) when I've searched the Star website for the headline or the lede, it hasn't turned up anything.
There have even been one or two times when an article is teased in the print version of the newspaper, and they tell you to go to the ipad version for the full story!
So it seems that there are Toronto Star articles that can't be read in the print newspaper, on a computer, on a non-ipad tablet, or on a non-ipad i-device. They can only be read on an ipad.
Which is not a negligible inconvenience for people who don't need or can't afford ipads!
An ipad costs several hundred dollars. (Currently, the prices in the Apple Store range from $329 to $1429.) My experience with other Apple products has been that I can only get a few years of use out of them, and I see no indication that this would be any different for ipads.
So the Star is creating a situation where, to get access to all the journalism in your local daily, you need to pay at least $100 a year to another, unaffiliated corporation for a device that you may well have no other need for.
Do the owners of the Toronto Star own Apple stock?
I'm also wondering how this will affect googleability and archivability. Since I can't seem to get at them via web, it seems they aren't googleable. Can you access old articles in the app, or does it give you solely today's content? (I have no idea, because I don't have an ipad.) Do they turn up in library periodical indices so they'll be available to people doing historical research in the future? If the Star writes an article about your kid's awesome science project or gives your play a glowing review, is there a way to save the article for posterity? Even after the ipad is obsolete?
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