I was surfing around at the Digital Homes magazine website, and chanced upon an interesting service, Zinio. For a subscription fee, it lets you download digital copies of magazines, page for page, onto your hard drive.
It may be ideal for people who love reading magazines but don’t want to clutter up the place / kill trees / spend too much money. Also, say you’re looking for an interesting article you came across a while ago, but now can’t seem to find the page. Zinio is able to search for terms similar to the way Adobe Acrobat reader does. There are hot spots for web links listed in articles, so you can visit the site in question. And the page-flipping effect make it feel like you are going through a normal magazine (you can turn it off if it bugs you).
To view the digital mags, you need to install Zinio’s reader software. This allows you to view the magazines on normal PCs as well as tablet PCs and Macs (Panther). You can view your mags on different computers, as long as you download the magazine files again. You can even mark out certain pages to email to other people. One downside is the huge file space usage and download time – an issue of the image-intensive Architectural Record was 23MB. Thank goodness I have a CD writer. And broadband.
I’m trying out some free samples of back issues now. If I’m happy enough I may sign up for a subscription or three. [Assuming I can’t find the same content online!] Coming to think of it, the paper equivalent would have cost me a good amount of overseas postage too.