I’m a die-hard paper fan. I have a few shelves of books in almost every room of the house and I love taking a stack of magazines or newspapers on a plane – this is so ingrained in my psyche that I actually save magazines a few weeks before a long trip so I have something to read. But slowly, ever so slowly, this love of paper is leaving me. First, I abandoned print journalism for the bare-knuckle punch-fest that is blogging, and then I stopped reading print books and instead took up the Kindle, then the iPad. I literally have not cracked a paperback or hardback for a full, long read in more than a year. I’m not writing this to prove my early adopter cred but because the thought amazes me.

I still read the NY Times in dead-tree form and, although for a little while I thought The Daily would be the future of daily news, I think I’ll stick with the paper version for a few more months, at least until I wrap my head around the psychological process of reading general daily news online.

But the one thing I thought I’d never do was abandon my magazine habit. But slowly and surely magazines fell off my radar. First it was Wired because all the news in there I had read months before on the Internets. Then it was the Economist because I’d end up with a stack of magazines full of great stuff that I’d never read. I let my subscription to Fortune lapse and haven’t missed it. But if there’s one magazine I can’t get enough of in print form it’s the New Yorker.

I love the magazine. It has great, long pieces and funny marginalia. It has comics that I actually go through and consume before I read the actual articles. It has John Seabrook, whose Deeper turned me on to tech writing, and Anthony Lane. It’s like an effete liberal adult’s Mad Magazine without the harping of Harpers and the boredom of the Atlantic Monthly. The cover was always great, it was slim, and thus a copy of the New Yorker has accompanied me on almost every trip I’ve taken in the past decade.

But I’m about to cancel my print subscription. Why? Because the iPad version is far superior.

The iPad version includes everything that currently exists in the print title – including the full-page ads for Rolex and probably that damn Pokeboat – except in a much cleaner form. Each issue costs $4.99 and e-only subscriptions cost $59 a year. iPad and print subscriptions cost $69. That’s right: Conde Nast puts so little value on the paper that the magazine is printed on that it will give it to you for use as kindling for a mere $10 more. Other titles like GQ and Wired will cost $1.99 an issue or $19.99 a year. I doubt they will sell as well as the New Yorker.

Why? Well, the New Yorker is text heavy. It’s not quite gray in the way some magazines are – the iPad app uses the New Yorker’s classic ACaslon Regular font to reduce the general density of the text – and the stories are long and engaging. There are no graphical tricks, not too many multimedia events, and when there are, they’re great (one poetry reading by Sherman Alexie in the latest issue was amazing). And even the ads are unobtrusive and, dare I say it, beautiful in full living color. Everything about the iPad version is the same, yet strikingly different. This isn’t some rush-job given to a bunch of magazine designers who slap a little video in the corner of a horribly laid-out page. This is a full rethinking of the title and changes entirely how we consume long-form writing.