Pick Your Poison: Digital or Paper?
8:22 PM
I've always been a sucker for magazines. It all started with American Girl Magazine, and grew into an obsession from there. You name it, I've subscribed to it-- Teen, YM, Seventeen, Lucky, Elle, Allure. You get the picture. I used to love seeing a new magazine peeking out from the mailbox and flipping through the pages on the floor of my bedroom after school. Today though, things play out a little differently; instead of looking to my mailbox (which is abnormally tiny, my Birchbox doesn't even fit in it) I look toward my iPad for my fix. When I fly home to Texas I always make sure to charge my iPad and download the most recent issues of my favorite magazines. Currently I love Real Simple, Glamour, and Vogue.
But It's not just the weight and convenience that has me favoring the digital counterparts of these printed relics, (because believe me, a handful of magazines weighs more than you think) it's also the content and delivery. Glamour features tablet exclusives as I learned this month when I tried to read an article about sprucing up your resume in the paper issue, only to find it was a tablet exclusive feature. Reading that paper copy almost felt unnatural to me. I liked an outfit... I wanted to save it, but how? Clip the photo and put it in a binder? With the digital version I can snap a screenshot and upload it to a Pinterest board in seconds.
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| Real Simple March 2014 // Glamour January 2014 // Real Simple January 2014 |
In some cases it's the price-- some magazines offer crazy cheap digital subscriptions starting at $1 per issue. Others charge $5 for access to digital subscriptions on top of the price of their paper subscriptions. Unfortunately, I had to let a few of my subscriptions that fell into the latter category lapse, but so it goes when it comes to fashion.
I think a lot of my former hipster classmates from my Print & Multimedia Journalism major at Emerson would call me blasphemous for singing the praises of the digital press and it certainly raises issues with cost and worth and sticker shock from the consumer, but I am a convert. These days I rarely touch a printed magazine unless I'm handing it it off to a friend or coworker. What say you? Do you prefer paper or digital magazines?
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