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- New yearly subscription costs €395

The Irish Times has launched a "digital archive", it’s addition to the newspaper’s website Ireland.com’s digital text archive.

According to ENN.ie, the “digital” scanned archive was co-funded by the Irish Times Ltd and the Library Council of Ireland through the Department of the Environment.

While the new archive will be free in public libraries and for primary and secondary schools, current paid subscribes will not have access to it.

The Times have developed a new subscription level ‘P+’ or ‘Premium Plus’ for between €395 yearly or €10 for 24-hour access.

The only extra for premium plus users is the scanned archives back to the newspaper’s launch in 1859. It’s a lot of content, but it comes in at over €300 euro extra per year then the normal €79 premium access.

The searchable system is also heavily restricted when it comes to saving content. Content can be saved by viewing ‘printer friendly’ PDF documents, however, text is not selectable as paragraphs appear as images not selectable text.

We tried the first edition of the Irish Times and a further flaw comes as articles that transcend multiple columns appear as different stories in the printer friendly PDFs.

That said, for just reading old editions of the newspaper the system built into Ireland.com works as well as, if not better then, other digital editions readers we’ve seen.

The new system is available for free to current subscribes until the end of the month.