I’ve had a life-long love of and fascination with magazines.
A few years go, I had an opportunity to lay out a short-lived arts and culture mag for print and thought this was the dog’s proverbial.
It started in school days with Match or Shoot!, the WWF magazine, later, .net magazine from the 90s right through to its print retirement in 2020. Sound On Sound, Easy Food, BBC Good Food, Resolution, Men’s Health, Total Film, Empire, countless photography titles, Hot Press, State – you name it, if it was anything to do with food, tech or music over the last 20 year’s I’ve likely bought it.
Much like everything else in life, magazines got pricey in recent years. Cover prices from the UK started going up by a couple of quid, which meant a few extra Euro on top by the time it hit the local shops. When you realise you’re dropping more four figures a year on magazines while other bills are racking up, something’s got to give.
Enter PressReader, largely courtesy of my free – yes, free – library subscription.
I’d been using some of the Amazon Prime benefits over the years including access to a rotating selection of magazines I could download to the kindle app.
Then last year, I came across PressReader having joined the library. It’s free to join your local library (in Ireland anyway), and there’s a tone of stuff you can get access to without ever having to set foot in the building.
Sure, you can take the free option with PressReader.com and get access to maybe fifty-odd magazine titles and a hundred or so newspaper titles.
Or, you can subscribe for the cost of two magazines a month and get access to over 6,000 titles.
Better still, with your library card number, you can sign into a subscriber account backed by your local authority library and start reading pretty much what you want, when you want.
On the Irish side, there’s daily and weekly (read weekend) newspapers along with anything from the aforementioned Empire and Total Film to Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Variety, Vanity Fair and any number of titles under food and drink, gaming, health and fitness, music, news, automotive, business, technology and more.
Ok, you won’t get to physically hold them in your hand, and you’re sure not going to get the smell of freshly pressed ink from your aging tablet, but it’s a grand way of getting your magazine fix.
