Can a new wine skin save an old wine that’s going bad? San Jose, Silicon Vally, based Mercury News seem to think so, with the launch of their new Mercury News e-Edition.

This morning I woke up to find a mail from Mercury News with a “special announcement” about this great new service — a complete re-production of the print paper online.

The mail itself seem to have been sent by a toddler who spent so much time playing with his toys and didn’t have enough time to finish editing the template. [Seen those newsletter / website templates with text like "Your Company Name Here" sort of thing?]. But I digress. Here’s the gist of the mail:

Special Announcement:

Today, we are announcing the launch of the Mercury News e-Edition. The e-Edition is not just a website. It’s every story, picture, and ad exactly as it appears on every page. And, you’ll be able to do things you can’t do with the print edition, such as:

• Get Silicon Valley news by viewing our four daily editions
• View our free 30-day archive to view news you’ve missed
• Get print content NOT available on MercuryNews.com
• Search the Mercury News with advanced search tools
• Enlarge the type for easier reading

Here’s a screen shot (click image for for bigger one), and you can try the demo of this new service here.

This service costs US$15 for a “7-day, 5-week e-Edition subscription” and if you ask me, that’s pretty steep. Granted, I don’t live in San Jose or even in the United States to know how these people love their newspaper ads to want to pay for it, and this was obviously not built for me.

But I checked out the demo all the same and I wasn’t impressed at all.

The main problem here is that of navigation. First it’s no fun reading those tiny columns on screen. After figuring out the fairly complicated navigation system, folks like me with tiny screens will have to continually be scrolling left and right to read the content of a page.

Oh, and where is page 65 that this article continues from? Hello?

The scanned text was also really painful on my eyes. Unfortunately, increasing the text size completely breaks the columnar layout, turning it into a regular linear web page. So why the hassle?

Will advertisers have to pay more because their ads are getting online? In any case, what’s the value to be gained from online ads that are not linked to any landing page?

As I’ve said, I don’t live in the United States, so I may be missing the point of this new service entirely. That probably explains why I don’t get this either:

Missed some news during the week? Catch up during your free time when you can relax. With the e-Edition, you have access to our 30-day archive. You can quickly and easily review the news & ads you otherwise would have missed. Take a test drive and view a demo here

Wow. So people really miss ads? Not me.

Now I was convinced this was not for me, so I just had to unsubscribe. So I scroll down to the bottom of the mail, and hit the link that says “Manage Your Subscriptions (to unsubscribe from this mailing)”. And what do I get?

What? But I only wanted to unsubscribe? Naturally, I went the far easier route: which was to hit the Spam button.

But seriously I’m interested in knowing what value proposition (beyond going back to missed ads ) that such a content format would offer. Who are the likely audiences for something like this? Share your thoughts below.