Back in the early days of newspapers on the web in the mid-‘90s I advocated that we put the paper I worked for at the time (The Herald-Sun in Durham) online as an image showing the newspaper as laid out in print, with image-map links that would call up stories in HTML.

Nobody thought much of my idea. The standard way of putting a newspaper online had already become to repackage the entire publication in HTML in a style that looked nothing like the newspaper itself, and which provided a completely different, and, to my way of thinking, inferior, experience.

Maybe I’m old school, but I like to see where a paper plays a story, how many columns wide, how big a headline, what page, etc. None of this is evident from your average newspaper’s website. Check out today’s print News & Observer front page (left) vs. the online home page:

I may be able to get the same information somewhere on the website, but the print layout tells me more about a newspaper’s priorities, what issues they’re pushing, what issues they want to de-emphasize, and the basic character of the publication, than any website can.

For some years after papers threw all their news up on websites, you had no choice but to pick through pages that looked like the one on the right above. If you got the print edition of the same paper, you had the best of both worlds. If, however, you wanted to see how a paper played a story on its print front page, you were out of luck.

A few years later the Newseum in Washington began posting front pages from around the country, so, if the paper you wanted to see was included, you could at least see the front page. The inside the print paper, though, remained inaccessible.

Then, shortly before I left The Herald-Sun in 2005, an outfit called Olive Software developed a means for a paper to provide online a navigable version of its print edition, called an e-edition. It was a hard sell, though, because it was a very expensive service, and cumbersome to use, as I recall. And it was thought back then that not many people would prefer an e-edition when they could get a traditional web page version of news content.

Olive hung in there, though, and it seems things may be turning its way. Suddenly, newspapers are seeing the e-edition as a means of realizing some revenue from people who might otherwise have dropped the paper entirely.

Like me, for instance. In August I dropped my News & Observer home delivery edition and opted for the N&O’s e-edition. I was not trying to be “green” and save the trees. I had more practical reasons. One was cost: the print edition cost nearly $200 a year and the e-edition was less than $70 per year. The other was convenience. No longer would I have to stop my paper when I went on vacation, or stay on an endless robo-call loop while trying to complain about a missed edition.

But the big test would be whether I would enjoy mousing around an e-edition of a newspaper as much as I enjoyed leafing through the dead-tree version. The answer is a resounding yes.

I have a laptop with a 15-inch screen and when I choose the full-page display of the e-edition I find it is easier to read than the print edition. The display is consistently bright, the color photos are excellent, I can see all the ads as they appear on the page in print, and I can increase the size of the page at will to aid my failing eyesight.

You can turn a page with a click of a mouse, and you can double click on a story and choose to see it as text or as a page layout, though I choose to just scroll the whole page. (The N&O front page above was taken from my e-edition today.)

The big question for newspapers is, am I unusual or is the e-edition going to catch on and end what sometimes seem to be a death spiral for print? I can’t tell you what the N&O’s experience has been, but e-editions are booming nationwide. The latest reports show them growing by 47 percent in the past year:

Last fall, 282 newspaper reported e-editions in their weekday average totaling 1,577,732. By contrast, for the same period this year, 445 newspapers reported e-editions in their weekday—totaling 2,314,815, for a roughly 47 percent increase in e-editions, according to an ABC rep.

The News & Observer doesn’t show in the list of the largest e-editions (see below), but I’d be surprised if their e-edition service, which is excellent, doesn’t grow substantially.

An e-edition presumes a print edition, however. And putting together a print edition of a newspaper is a very labor-intensive operation. Only people can do it. There isn’t a piece of software made that can automatically lay out a newspaper, choose headline sizes, column widths, write photo captions and subheads, and with a printer’s eye make sure everything lines up.

You can, though, get software that can help you publish your newspaper content as a web page, using a fraction of the manpower. That begs the question: How long will there be a print edition to make an e-edition from?

I don’t have the answer to that. I’ll just enjoy it while it lasts. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a wet newspaper in my yard since August.

Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper Carolina Journal.