Category Archives: magazines

Digital Magazines: Regular or Super-Sized?

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All of my magazine subscriptions are in digital format. Several of them (New Scientist, Rolling Stone, Esquire) I read via the Zinio App. Many others (most of my science fiction magazines, for instance) I read via the Kindle App. And several I read as PDF files (Writer’s Digest, Scientific American, and Locus). I noticed that there is a trend to make magazines more interactive, which could be a good thing, but the trend seems to be to make them more interactive in a less useful way.

When I think of good “interactive” features, I think of things like highlighting text and/or articles. Capturing notes. Linking to additional online material. Sharing items over social media. Some of the apps do some of these things, but the trends seems to be more along the lines of marketing tie-ins. In Esquire, for instance, there is a SHOP button that I can tap if I want to shop for something I see in an ad on the page. (Possibly, this is a useful feature to some, but in Esquire, I find that the things on the page often cost multiple thousands of dollar.)

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And then there is the exploding size of the magazines. Take Scientific American for instance, a magazine which I’ve been reading for nearly two-decades, and one I love. The digital version of the magazine is offered as a PDF file, which is generally between 20-30 MB in size, and which I read via the Kindle App on my iPad. Recently, Scientific American has informed me that as a subscriber to the digital edition, I can now access the magazine directly on my iPad. So I have this a try. Turns out, I prefer the PDF version. Part of the problem is that the iPad version is often several hundred megabytes in size, 10 times at least the size of the PDF file. Why is this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s due to the embedding of all kinds of extra multimedia stuff within the file. Time magazine did this as well, and I hated it. I love the idea of reading my magazines in digital form, and having them look just the way the print versions look–but I hate the idea of stuffing all kinds of extras into the file. If you want to include these, make them links so that I can optionally download them. As it stands, I can hold hundreds of issues of Scientific American on my iPad in PDF format–but far less in the ballooned iPad format.

Do we really need these super-sized versions of our digital magazines, or is the regular version with some embedded links good enough? I tend to lean toward the latter, but then again, I read the paper version of the magazine for a long time before I switched to the digital version and I may be biased by that.

Clarkesworld Magazine Subscription Drive

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Never read short science fiction stories and want to find out what all the buzz is about? Or maybe you were once a science fiction reader looking to get back into the game? Head on over to Clarkeworld Magazine and subscribe. Clarkeworld has been publishing some outstanding science fiction from Genevieve Valentine to Tobias Buckell to Ken Liu and Kij Johnson and Catherynne M. Valente and more.

In addition to their excellent fiction, they also have compelling nonfiction articles and gorgeous cover art.

And one of the best readers in the business, Kate Baker, reads one of the stories each issue as part of the Clarkesworld podcast. And that podcast is free of charge.

You can have the magazine automatically delivered to your Kindle App or device. Or you can subscribe via Weightless Books.

Head on over and check them out.

Apex Magazine Is Having a Subscription Drive

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Yesterday, I posted a list of all of my current magazine subscriptions. One of those subscription is to Apex Magazine, a wonderful magazine edited by Lynne Thomas, that publishes science fiction, fantasy and horror. They always publish great stories. They’ve even published a story by yours truly.

Apex is having a subscription drive. If you are looking for a magazine that publishes excellent SF/F/H stories with a somewhat darker edge to them, you can do no better than Apex. You can subscribe to the magazine in a variety of ways, including via Amazon Kindle, which is how I happen to get it. A subscription to Apex would make the perfect Halloween “treat” for that special someone.

Seriously, they publish great stuff. They’ve recently had excellent stories by Mary Robinette Kowal, Adam-Troy Castro, as well as my favorite Elizabeth Bear story, “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall.” Go forth and subscribe!

My Active Magazine Subscriptions and Where I Read Them

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Because I need a break from work, and to have a nice reference point, here is a listing of my active magazine subscriptions and where I read them:

  1. Analog Science Fiction (Kindle App)
  2. Apex Magazine (Kindle App)
  3. Asimov’s Science Fiction (Kindle App)
  4. Clarkesworld (Kindle App)
  5. Daily Science Fiction (Email)
  6. Fantasy & Science Fiction (Kindle App)
  7. InterGalactic Medicine Show (Kindle App)
  8. Lightspeed  Magazine (Kindle App)
  9. LOCUS Magazine (Kindle App via PDF)
  10. New Scientist (Zinio App)
  11. Rolling Stone (Zinio App)
  12. Scientific American (Kindle App via PDF)
  13. SFWA Bulletin (Print1)
  14. Time Magazine (via Apple Newsstand)
  15. Writer’s Digest (Kindle App via PDF)

I recently gave up my subscription to Discover Magazine (via Zinio) because I never read it. I just couldn’t get into it. I replaced it with the subscription to Writer’s Digest, which I initially subscribed to so I could read a good article by fellow writer’s group member Joanna Castle Miller. I decided the magazine was pretty good so I’m keeping that subscription.

I try to keep up with all of them as best as I can, although I do get behind and don’t read every word of every issue. The only magazine that I really don’t read at all is Time, but Kelly reads it (we also receive the print edition).

If you exclude Daily Science Fiction, which publishes on short story every weekday, that amounts to 19 issues each and every month.

Notes

  1. It is not available in electronic format. ↩

Dear Scientific American, Left hand, meet right hand

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I get that third-party vendors of digital magazines like Zinio may not share subscription information with the source magazine in question. So when I subscribed to New Scientist through Zinio and I kept getting renewal messages from New Scientist, it kind of made sense, in a bizarro-world kind of way. New Scientist simply didn’t have any way of knowing that I was still a subscriber through Zinio.

But Scientific American is another story. I love Scientific American and have been a subscriber for 15+ years now. Recently, I let my paper subscription lapse and replaced it with a digital subscription. The digital subscription is not through Zinio, but through Scientific American‘s website. You’d think all of this would be associated and recorded in the same database, but I keep getting e-mail from Scientific American with urgent warnings that my subscription has lapsed and I am going to miss out on vital scientific reporting, to say nothing of great savings on my subscription.

Wrong. I am not missing out on anything. I have the latest issues, all of them. I got them using my subscription to the digital (PDF) version of Scientific American, to which I subscribed through the Scientific American website. Why can’t their subscription department figure this out and stop pestering me? You’d think that a magazine that reports on science and technology–including articles on information technology–would have a clue and get their act together.

Come on, folks, you can do better than this. After all, you are Scientific American for crying out loud!

My first-ever issue of Rolling Stone magazine

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As embarrassing as it is to admit, I’ve never read a single issue of Rolling Stone. I’m not sure I’ve even looking inside an issue. But earlier in the week, io9 announced that Peter Dinklage had made the cover of Rolling Stone. Being a fan of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones as well as Peter Dinklage, I looked to see if the issue was available on Zinio, the app that I use to read several magazines on my iPad, including New Scientist and Discover. As it turned out, while Rolling Stone is available through Zinio, the issue in question is not yet on the news stands. But the current issue featured an interview with President Obama. The price of the issue on Zinio was $4.99, I think. And since I knew I also wanted the next issue, I decided to bite the bullet and pay for a subscription, which was less than $20.

Last night, in between various tasks, I read the magazine. Not the entire magazine cover-to-cover. I skimmed a lot of it, but I read every one of the feature articles. All I could think was what have I been missing? It was a fantastic read. I’m not up with the current music scene, but the in depth articles about Levon Helms and Gregg Allman were fantastic. The interview with the President was fascinating. And even the in lengthy profile about Floyd Mayweather kept me riveted. The truth is I loved reading the magazine and I am already looking forward to the next issue.

The next issue, incidentally, is supposed to hit news stands today, according to the i09 article. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve checked Zinio to see if it has shown up yet. I really want to read the article on Peter Dinklage.

As if I didn’t have enough to read already with 3 science magazines and half a dozen science fiction magazines, I’ve now added Rolling Stone into the mix. Great stuff!

Goodbye, paper edition of Scientific American, hello digital

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I think I’ve had an unbroken subscription to Scientific American for the last 15 years or so. This week, I gave up my paper subscription. I usually purchased my subscription for 3 years at a time, but the latest round was due to expire in June or July, I think. I’d started getting the reminder notices, telling me to renew my subscription. Well, after my experiment in January, seeing how the magazine looked in the digital edition on my iPad, I decided not to renew the paper edition and instead, subscribe to the digital edition.

While the digital subscription is about $5 more each year, there are three big advantages:

  1. I get each month’s issue a week before it hits the newsstands.
  2. I can read the issue on my iPad.
  3. I have access to the entire digital archive of the magazine going back to 1993.

That latter item is huge. I’ve already played around with it. I can access a PDF copy of about 200 issues of the magazine. I can download either the entire issue in PDF format, or just the article I happen to be interested in. Now, when reading a current article that refers to an earlier article, I don’t have to wonder about it. If it appeared in a post-1992 issue, I can get it and read it.

Of course, there is also the usual benefit of being able to search within the issues, to say nothing of not having stacks of magazines cluttering my office.

The only magazine I still receive in paper form is Time and I also get that in digital. I’d give up the paper version there, too, but Time does not provide an option for that. To receive the digital version, you must also get the paper version. Maybe one day they will figure this out, too.