Digital Magazines

[Teromous]

I have a subscription to BYO and usually buy Zymurgy off the magazine stands. I like to save these magazines, but keeping them in binders still doesn't preserve them as well as I'd like, and I have to be careful when flipping through them, looking for an old article. I thought it would be nice to have a digital copy. I went online and saw that I can get a digital edition for an extra $5 which doesn't seem bad. Zymurgy has eZymurgy as well...and I can just get that with a regular subscription and stop buying off the shelf.

The problem is that it looks like both of these have a special program or something you have to download to read the magazine. When I download music, I pay for an .mp3 and I get it. Do you guys know of some way I can just get this in a .pdf form? I'm not looking for anything fancy. I just wanted to know if maybe these programs have an option to just download the magazine instead of the usual "flipping pages" thing...

Sorry this was intended to be posted in General Chit-chat...

 

[Yooper]

I have a subscription to BYO and usually buy Zymurgy off the magazine stands. I like to save these magazines, but keeping them in binders still doesn't preserve them as well as I'd like, and I have to be careful when flipping through them, looking for an old article. I thought it would be nice to have a digital copy. I went online and saw that I can get a digital edition for an extra $5 which doesn't seem bad. Zymurgy has eZymurgy as well...and I can just get that with a regular subscription and stop buying off the shelf.

The problem is that it looks like both of these have a special program or something you have to download to read the magazine. When I download music, I pay for an .mp3 and I get it. Do you guys know of some way I can just get this in a .pdf form? I'm not looking for anything fancy. I just wanted to know if maybe these programs have an option to just download the magazine instead of the usual "flipping pages" thing...

Sorry this was intended to be posted in General Chit-chat...

I don't have a tablet or smart phone, but I can read BYO just fine on my computer. I don't know how it works on a tablet, though!

 

[MichaelBrock]

It would be nice if both magazines offered the digital editions as e-books of some form. I'm sure the reason they don't is so they maintain control over who has a copy. Which ties in to the major downside of accessing them online. If you ever stop your subscription, as I recently did with Zymurgy, you no longer have access to those digital editions you "purchased".

 

[Teromous]

It would be nice if both magazines offered the digital editions as e-books of some form. I'm sure the reason they don't is so they maintain control over who has a copy. Which ties in to the major downside of accessing them online. If you ever stop your subscription, as I recently did with Zymurgy, you no longer have access to those digital editions you "purchased".

That's what I was worried about. Thanks for adding your personal experience in the matter, it helps my purchasing decision greatly. I buy .mp3's and don't need to use a special program for them, hopefully in the future we will have the same for magazines.

I was hoping that I wouldn't have to scan my magazines. Even with auto-feeders some pages inevitably end up skewed, and a true .pdf would be nicer in both appearance and the ability to use a search function.

As far as accountability, I purchased training videos from a vendor online. They would make this semi-transparent watermark in the video that had my name and address. I thought it was an interesting way to counter digital piracy, but it is very annoying that the paying end-user always ends up with inconveniences like this.