The New York Times discovers the Mac

When Bill Gates and New York Times (NYT) publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. unveiled the Times Reader in April 2006, they demonstrated the program to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers on a tablet PC — a piece of hardware Gates was very excited about at the time.

Tablets still haven’t quite caught on, but the software — which syncs to the Times’ servers and delivers an easy-to-read, paginated version of the paper that can be browsed offline — developed a loyal following. At least among Windows users; more than two years later, there still isn’t a version that runs on the Apple (AAPL) Macintosh.

But there will be. On Tuesday, Rob Larson, VP for digital production at the Times, showed off sample pages of Times Reader for the Mac and announced that a beta version will be available later this month. See here.

Larson also stuck around to answer questions. The service will be free while it’s in beta. After that it will cost $14. 95 a month (about a quarter the price of a print subscription). If you have a home delivery subscription, you’ll get the Times Reader for free.

It’s a Cocoa application that uses Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight plugin to render the pages.