You can navigate through the magazine in a variety of ways. For instance, you can flip pages using your keyboard's left and right arrows. Arrow keys that span the bottom of the program's interface also let you turn pages. To flip one page at a time, you can click the bottom portion of any page and the reader will advance to the next one. This is perhaps the easiest and fastest form of navigation. You also can hold down the right mouse button to move whole pages.

TechTV Labs put the reader to a real-world test. We downloaded the March 26, 2002, issue of PC Magazine, one of the few magazines currently offered on this system. Once we paid the $5.99 fee, a window launched telling us the magazine was ready for download. Thanks to our fast connection, the issue downloaded in about a minute, and we were ready to read.

In our tests the digital version looked quite nice displayed on our 15-inch LCD screen. The 150-page (or so) issue contained all the editorial content and advertisements. Two pages displayed on the screen at a time -- one on the left, the other on the right -- and you can zoom in on any portion of the displayed page.

When flipping pages, the text looks blurry at first. But when it comes into focus, text is dense and sharp. The experience of browsing and reading the magazine was fun, and we liked the "content" feature, which allows you to click on the table of contents and go directly to an article. Or, if a link occurs in a story, you can go directly to the referenced website from the story.

However, some pages were too dark to be readable. The first paragraphs of an article on LCD notebook testing were so dark the story was unreadable unless we increased its size by zooming in on it. Page-turning mimicked what you would expect from a paper version of a magazine.