Digital magazines

Worried you’ll soon be crushed under teetering towers of Stuff (and other, lesser mags)? Craig Grannell shows how you can keep up with your favourites in digital form instead…

Yep, read Stuff and find out how to read Stuff

THE BASICS ■ Try or buy

Do you want to own digital magazines or just rent access to their back catalogues? As with music and video, that decision will determine which services to use. You can always subscribe to one or two favourites then widen your available reading matter by way of an ‘unlimited’ service.

■ Take a tablet

You can read digital mags on a phone, but doing so can be fiddly. They’ll work on a laptop, but landscape screens aren’t well suited to magazines… unless you have a huge display and can set up your digital mags to display as spreads. So if you have the means, use a tablet to read your mags – preferably one that’s at least ipad-sized.

■ Make mags visible

If you’ve been buying loads of paper magazines, you might have a guilt pile – a stack of mags to read that you’ve not yet got around to. With digital, you’ll have the opposite problem: all those unread issues are invisible. So make your mag apps prominent on your home screen and set up notifications to remind you when new issues arrive.

■ Use your library

We’re not suggesting you hotfoot it to your local public library every time a new magazine comes out that you fancy reading. But if you have a library card, head to your local branch’s website and find out if they can hook you up with digital services. Many of them can, providing instant access to a range of digital magazines.

■ Augment with RSS

Magazines are amazing, under-appreciated things, giving people curated content based on subjects they love. They can surprise and widen what you take in, rather than letting you stagnate in an online bubble. But immediacy can be a boon too, so augment digital mags with RSS feeds, which pipe website headlines and articles to your reader of choice.