So in case you’ve been living under an Internet-proof rock for the past few hours, News Corp’s über-buzzy new iPad publication The Daily launched today. And the price is right: The app is available on the Apple store as a free download, a subscription costs about 14 cents a day (99 cents per week), and a yearly subscription is $40 — leaps and bounds better than the old regime of huge, CD-ROM-like iPad magazines that cost $4 or $5 an issue, no better than their newsstand counterparts. Also, for its first two weeks, everything will be free, courtesy of sponsor Verizon Wireless.
Still, we believe in checking stuff out before you buy it, and if you don’t have an iPad on hand, live outside of the US, or are simply leery of downloading apps that automatically renew subscriptions until you cancel them, it’s possible to check out the articles thanks to Google. (You can also see individual articles when friends share links, but these do not allow you to browse the whole publication, and we’re assuming here that you don’t have rich, monocled friends willing to shell out a princely $0.14 cents per day and then send you links.)
Until The Daily’s robots.txt blocks search engines or BajillionHits.biz’s Alex Blagg unveils his “new business model for starting a traditional ad-supported website that is just a daily digest of links to all The Daily’s articles,” thus creating a revolutionary new paradigm, if you want to see The Daily articles cached by Google, you can type in site:thedaily.com in Google, or simply go to http://www.google.com/search?&q=site:thedaily.com. The articles won’t be as pretty as they would in the app, but you can get a feel for some of the writing before you take the plunge.
Update: Or, try this.
(h/t Rex Sorgatz)
