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I have a weakness for magazines in electronic form. A long time ago I used to buy the British magazine MacFormat since it came with a CD which compensated for my lack of Internet access, and on it there was a self-contained application that displayed a free, community-built magazine. While I couldn’t compare back then, I still find the designed nature of page-based magazines more pleasing to the eye and less “information overload” than most web sites. As a modern-day example, I find Engadget’s free iPad magazine Distro far easier to read than the Engadget web site. Even worse is The Verge, which is so heavy that I need to use Opera Mini on my iPad to read it.

And now with tablets, electronic magazines shine. They are perfect of “casual reading”, they look amazing on those color screens, and since they’re all in electronic form they are less annoying than paper magazines that you need to store and recycle. In fact, I prefer reading books on e-ink readers (like the traditional Kindle) and magazines on a tablet (like the iPad).

There are many apps for magazines that contain in-app subscriptions, such as The Economist and Project. For one-to-one transfers of magazines to pseudo-PDF you can use Zinio, which includes a plain-text version of each article for easier reading on an iPhone. All of these are at prices that compete with physical magazines, and for some you may even save money.