Reading Magazines Online

I like reading magazines, but being very nearsighted, I've found it almost impossible to read most current magazines in their paper editions. It's frustrating, because one of my favourite activities used to be spending an hour our two browsing through the magazine racks at the library. (My vision changed dramatically after having cataract surgery; while my distance vision is far better, my close-up vision is worse).

Fortunately, the library has a solution. I download and read magazines on my phone, tablet, or PC.

I'm basing this post on the services offered by Toronto Public Library and my local library in Pickering, but most larger public libraries will likely have the same or similar offerings.

RB Digital

My favourite of the three services discussed in this review is RB Digital formerly Zinio Reader, which offers both audiobooks and magazines. TPL has over 500 magazines, the majority in English. Reading the magazine is similar to reading a PDF of the edition. You can zoom in to a comfortable text size and scroll through a page. Selection of magazines is by scrolling through a gallery of covers, which you can sort alphabetically, but there is no grouping by category.

What I especially like about RB Digital is the text mode feature, which converts an article to a cleanly formatted page of text, including photos, without the multi-column layout. It also has a reverse text mode (white text on a black background) which I find much easier on the eyes. This makes it easy to read magazines on my tablet or even my phone.

RB Digital works equally well on my Android phone and tablet using their app or on my PC in a broswer. You can check out magazines to your library account and check them back in when you are done. There is no requirement to return magazines, so you can build up a collection of issues. Printing is available in a browser but not in the app.

PressReader

PressReader, available at Toronto Public Library, has a huge selection of both magazines and newspapers in over 60 languages. Fortunately you can filter it by either newspapers or magazines, language, and country. You can also select magazines by category.

Like RB Digital, there is both a page view and text view, although PressReader's text view isn't formatted as cleanly as the one in RB Digital and doesn't offer a reverse text mode.

Printing isn't as convenient as it is in RB Digital and I haven't been able to figure out any way of printing more than one page at a time. Also logging in is trickier in the app as you have to be logged in first in the browser (or have been logged in during the last 48 hours). Otherwise, reading in page view is very similar to RB Digital.

Subscribers to Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper will find this familiar, because the Globe and Mail uses PressReader for their Globe2Go app.

Flipster

I haven't used Flipster as much as the other two services because it has a smaller selection of magazines. Oddly, the magazine selection at Toronto Public Library and Pickering Public Library is different. Selection is by scrolling through a list of magazines that can be grouped by category.

Like the other two services, Flipster can be used through a browser or an app on mobile devices. I think it uses a different dispaly engine because the text when zoomed in isn't as clean. There is no text view when using the browser as far as I can tell, but it's available in the app (though not with reverse text) and only works on pages that have one article.

You can print pages or the whole issue.