Just curious if anyone reads magazines. Physical paper ones; not Magazine web sites. How many did you read at your peak and how many now?
At my peak of concurrent magazine subscriptions I read:
Computer Gaming World, which folded (briefly the subscription turned into a PC Gamer subscription which I let lapse).
PC World, which I lost interest in and let lapse
Time, Playboy and most recently Entertainment Weekly where I found I was just letting issues stack up unread so one after the other I let the subscriptions lapse. In the case of EW I had been subscribing for 20 years which is something I didn’t even realize until just now when I remembered I started getting it in 1994.
So I went from five magazines each month at one point to none. How about you?
I still get about a dozen paper magazines. Some day I’ll get some sort of reader and ditch the paper.
Car & Driver
Road & Track
Bicycling
Velo News
Road Bike Action
Bicycle Times
Wired
Mensa Bulletin
MSDN - THE MICROSOFT JOURNAL FOR DEVELOPERS
and a few others I can’t think of now.
I’m actually at an all-time high (of three) in print magazine subscriptions, those being:
Car & Driver Trains Smithsonian
I often, but not always, pick up newsstand copies of the following:
Aeroplane Monthly Fortean Times Entertainment Weekly Empire Model Railroader Scientific American (I’m kinda scientific, and I’m an American, so what the hey.)
I still subscribe to Fretboard Journal and Vintage Guitar. At my peak, I received those two plus National Geographic, Reader’s Digest and National Review. My wife subscribes to Southern Living, Midwest Living and a yoga magazine. AARP shows up every month without us having done anything except aging.
I get National Geographic, Cook’s Illustrated, and Game Informer. Used to get Runner’s World and Archaeology - I really need to resubscribe to Archaeology. And somehow they find out you’re pregnant and start sending you American Baby.
Of course, I’m a periodicals librarian and I sort of do this for a living. At the library we continue to get more than a thousand magazine subscriptions.
I love reading magazines. I read them in bed to fall asleep, while lying on the deck in the summer, while eating my lunch at work, and on planes or buses or whatever. Don’t have to worry about the battery dying and I like to cut out recipes or workouts. Plus the physiotherapy place near my work collects recent magazines to send to our troops overseas.
I subscribe to Canadian Running and Women’s Health all the time, and sometimes add Self or Fitness or a similar magazine if a coworker’s kid is having a fundraiser or something. I send the Canadian Running ones to my friend in the Yukon and she subscribes to the American running one, Runner’s World, and gives those to me. But she always saves them up for when I visit and I bring home a year’s worth.
I am a master of getting free magazine subscriptions so I tend to have a lot going at any given time. Right now, I have active subscriptions to:
National Geographic
Smithsonian
Flying
Plane and Pilot
Men’s Journal
Playboy
Wired
Money
Fortune
Country
Yatching
Coastal Living
Southern Living
Car and Driver
GQ
Esquire
I am probably forgetting a few more. I did not pay a penny for any of mine.
I only read one magazine faithfully—I’ve been subscribing to Mad since 1987. Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one still reading it.
Saw a young girl at a Barnes and Noble, maybe 14 years old buying one, which I thought was great. Then my wife pointed out she was probably buying it for her father.
I currently receive the following in my mail (I read parts of all of them, but not the whole thing):
The Economist
The New Yorker
The Nation
Entertainment Weekly
some HR magazine I get through an association
The following I get in my Kindle (NOT the question but oh well):
Nylon
2600
Honestly this is probably my peak since I started these all about a year ago or less, but I know I used to get Popular Mechanics and some other magazines in the past.
When I’m on my computer I’ve got other things to do besides read. I don’t have a tablet, and I’m not interested in reading on my phone.
The ones I get are
The New Yorker
Analog
F&SF
Asimov’s
Skeptic
A bunch of technical journals from IEEE, including one with my column I want to archive.
Computerworld and a bunch of electronics trade rags at work.
We sporadically get some magazines, like Money, on airline miles.
I get Games (or Games World of Puzzles) at airports before long trips.
The magazines I do get on-line versions of are trade rags which aren’t really in my area, but which I accept on-line because the person calling me to offer a free subscription sounds so pitiful. It is easier to get it and delete it, since no resources are wasted.
I have a subscription to the hard copy of This Old House, and I pick up Fine Woodworking and one or two other woodworking magazines maybe 6-8 times a year. I think my wife receives something- Good Housekeeping? Redbook? because her mother got her a subscription as a gift. And as it is, the magazines seem to reproduce when we’re not looking. I don’t know how some of you deal with all of them.
I’ll occasionally pick up Time magazine, Consumer Reports, Nat Geo, Grit, Bon Appetit and others if the cover looks interesting.
I still enjoy paper magazines! I always have one or two in the vehicles. I have this horror of being stuck in line or something and not having anything to read. Peering at my smartphone screen isn’t nearly as satisfying and flipping through pages.
I used to be a heavy magazine reader but I’ve let most of my subscriptions lapse as they ran out. I think partly it’s due to retirement; I used to read magazines at work. But also I feel that the cost of magazines has gone higher than I’m willing to pay.
The only subscriptions I still have are for my wargaming magazines. And while I enjoy the magazines, the main reason I keep up the subscriptions is for the games.