Readly, the Spotify for magazines

I try not to review paid products too much, but I'll make an exception for Readly, which I've described as the Spotify for magazines. Basically, you take out a subscription for £7.99 a month and you can read as many magazines as they have available. That is to say 30,240 issues. That's a total of 1515 magazines, including back issues, with one single subscription. The magazines are not ones that you've never heard of either, they are the kind that you'd probably buy in Smiths or the supermarket. In particular I read computer magazines, movie mags, photography, politics, comics, history and so on. I've taken a screenshot of a few of the magazines that are available to you:

There are options to also read magazines published in other countries, so as I'm a keen historian of the American Civil War I found 3 that I wanted to read within moments.

Not only do you get the current edition, but you also get a back run, and you can simply view any of these directly, or you can download them onto your device to read later. It's worth saying that it's the actual magazine itself, not a cut down version. 

However, it also gets better. You can download the app and read magazines on your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop; it's device independent. It gets better again, because for the same price you can have up to 5 profiles; so you can put your partner, children and so on onto your account and they can set their own profiles to read what they want to read. You can cancel a subscription at any time, although obviously you won't get to keep the magazines that you've downloaded, so think of it as an ongoing subscription service in exactly the same way that Spotify is. 

If you want to try it follow this link: 

https://get.readly.com/VtbbQKfPBXV9EauI

You'll get a month free to try it out, rather than the shorter trial version that you get with the normal download of the app (and in the interests of transparency, if you then subscribe I also get a month free as well). So as I said I don't normally push or try and 'sell' resources that cost money, but I'm really impressed with this, and if you buy a lot of magazines anyway, this will probably end up saving you money!

 Edited to add: I was asked about how easy it was to read what's on the screen. I wouldn't recommend a phone to try and read on, but I have tried it out on a 7" tablet, an iPad Air and an iPad Pro, and have absolutely no problems - it's as easy to read as reading the physical magazine. 

This is what a page looks like on an iPad Air in profile view.

The above image is a 2 page view in landscape. It's actually sharper than it appears here, and is certainly easy to read.

 

 I've zoomed right into the page for this shot - I could have got closer if I had wanted to. So it's actually far better than reading the printed version - unless you have a magnifying glass to hand!

Comments

[Carolyn Smith]

Phil, how do the articles look on screen. My concern is that a visual article with lots of pictures or a comic could be hard to read on anything less than a PC. What do you think?

[Gary Archer]

Don't forget many UK libraries now have emagazine services through Zinio, where customers can download magazines of a similar popular nature to Readly free using their library card. A Zinio for Libraries app lets you read them offline, and the magazine stays yours even if the library cancels its subscription. Titles most libraries have include the BBC titles, Good Housekeeping, Economist, Hello, New Scientist, Cosmo and many more.

Some also have Library PressDisplay where you can view world newspapers and magazines in full for around 90 days - for the UK it includes the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Express and many local papers, but also many other magazines, including some childrens titles.

Using the PressReader app you can download titles in libraries with subscriptions for offline reading, as the library becomes a hotspot that the app recognises.