Huge bonus from the beginning is the ability to do a full featured search without having to register as an F2 member or pay a cent.
You may search by keyword (with relatively simple keyword controls such as "phrases in quotes" and the AND keyword). You may choose which publications to search, a date period to search from and to, the newspaper section (eg. Entertainment) to search.
You are displayed a paged set of results up to a max of 200 results, with about 200 characters worth of the start of the article, with links to the full article.
Registering with F2 requires only your email, full name, state of birth (within Australia), country and date of birth. You do not have to enter any credit card details at this point.
When trying to view a pay-per-view article you are forwarded to a screen where you can buy credit. The minimum credit purchase is $11 ($10 worth of credit with $1 in GST).
Most articles you are likely to want to see are $1.60 each.
In some cases it isn't possible to tell if the article you want to view is relevant until you read more than the small amount you're given for free. In one case I viewed an article that had nothing to do with what I wanted, wasting $1.60.
Once you have credit it is possible to browse the site viewing articles while logged in and not realise you are spending money. There is a setting when registering that allows you to "Warn me about pages requiring payment". With this option on any pay-per-view page first displays a "this page will cost $X to view" page.
Overall it's all fairly easy to use but I don't feel like I'm getting much value for money. It's uglier and harder to use/search than Google. Also, articles are text only. It would be good to see any images used in articles also, although I understand the copyright issues surrounding this.
$1.60 is a hell of a lot of cash for a few hundred words. I also ask how much of this cash goes to the original author of the article or is it purely "service" money (for providing the search, archive etc.)?
Although, try to compare it to driving to a well sourced library, paying for a photocopy card, searching for hours through old newspapers for the article you want...
If such a library exists it might be worth using newsstore to find the article you're looking for, then head to the library to get it for free...
I've asked those at Beat and InPress if they're interested in leaving an online archive of their articles. Beat seemed interested but only in the idea... Given 99.9% of articles are sent to Beat/InPress and are not penned by them I believe the copyright minefield might be too hard to dive through.