The New York Times Reader beta is now available. Unlike Zinio which has a Mac client, it’s only available for Windows and uses .NET 3.0 which will work with Vista.

Times Reader runs on Tablet PCs which I think are the best devices to read electronic books and magazines, slate tablets in particular. A free NYT account is required.

When you first load the Times Reader it will ask for your NYT account username and password. Then it will show the screen below as it begins to sync and load the newspaper.

It took a good couple minutes to load up the content (front page shown at the very top of this post). As for features? Once the content loads and syncs, it still loaded slowly. A slider allowed easy increasing the size of the text, but I like the zoom feature in Zinio better. Good readability and the ability to read in either full screen or adjustable window. The ’settings’ option screen is sparse with only four choices: Check for new news every 30 minutes (default checked), Sync news daily at 3 A.M (default unchecked), automatically sync TimesReader on startup (default checked) and run news sync from the system tray (default checked).

The Times Reader search reacts to keywords as you type them in. For example, I typed in Microsoft and saw two stories appear in the bottom fairly quickly. I didn’t try annotating any articles on the tablet but it appears you can make notes in text or ink by pressing CTRL+C.

Hat tip to Major Nelson who thinks the Times Reader is better than Zinio. As someone who has used Zinio for a couple years, I disagree. You can’t subscribe to and read dozens of magazines including Playboy and Penthouse on Times Reader. I think from a content perspective, even though it’s the New York Times, there is no comparison between the two readers.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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