Read That Website in Print Mode

Someone sent me a link to a New York Times article on dark matter today, which was quite timely as I am about to embark on writing a feature of my own for another US publication on that subject. Anyway, the NYT article is immense, I mean it stretches across six web pages, each with its own array of graphics, ads and menu bars. I thought, there must be an easier way to save the article than clicking each page sequentially, but I didn’t want to fire up an old offline reader just for one article, and it was all getting too much when I spotted the “Print” icon close to the headline on the first page. What if? I thought…

So, I clicked the icon and up pops the whole article, all on a single page, without the ads, without the menus, in fact, exactly how you would want it to be if you were going to print it. But, I have no intention of printing it (there is no paper in my printer, anyway, and it’s just about to run out of ink), I just want to read it, assimilate some of the facts and be prepared for when I start my own research for my feature article.

Anyway, by sheer coincidence I was also scanning the Digital Inspiration blog from Amit Agarwal today and spotted a headline in his newsfeed that seemed to be related to my own Print revelation. He asks, is it okay to credit a printer friendly page.

Agarwal it seems was concerned by another blogger’s suggestion regarding whether it is okay to backlink to the print-friendly URL rather than the actual article with all its ads and menus? Well, at this juncture, I am not too worried about that personally I just wanted a quick and easy way to read the article. But, it does throw up yet another ethical question. If the author of the article is remunerated on the back of advertising revenues then bloggers who link out to the print friendly version might deprive their fellow author of cash. With that thought in mind you probably won’t ever see a “print friendly” icon on this website, although I’m not sure any other sites would be that worried about linking to any version at all of the articles here as it is.