How to Read and Share Magazines Online

With the advent of user-generated websites, it's possible now to download music, watch television shows, and read books online, all for free. Now some websites are making it possible for you to read your favorite magazines online as well. Although some magazines and newspapers make current issues available online, these new sites let you browse and read titles all in one place.

Instructions

1. Check out Mygazines, the increasingly popular user-generated magazines website. Mygazines is a free place to browse, share, archive and customize magazine articles and full magazines that are uploaded by users and made available to everyone for free. A recent search showed that Mygazines had more than 1,200 full magazines on its site, including a number of foreign publications, and almost 26,000 separate articles available for reading.

2. Choose the magazine or article you'd like to read on Mygazines, and it will appear as a "flip book." Pages can easily be turned by placing your cursor on the corner of a page to turn it. Because it survives through the contributions of its users, Mygazines also encourages you to upload your favorite magazines and articles to the site and includes directions on how to accomplish this. You can also join the site as a member and save magazines and articles to your own cart for reading later.

3. Visit other websites that act as portals to magazine sites. For example, Magatopia provides links to more than 1,000 free online magazines but simply takes you directly to the magazine website. Sites like Magatopia help make browsing and searching a step more efficient. At Magatopis, click on any magazine featured on its virtual magazine rack, and you will be taken to the correct site. Featured magazines range from Glamour to National Geographic, with plenty of links for any magazine enthusiast.

4. 

   Go to Zinio if you don't mind paying for a magazine and need to read it quickly. In addition to the immediate gratification, Zinio, clearly working with magazine publishers, provides users with the option of paying for a single issue of a magazine as an alternative to the usual annual subscription. Zinio also notes that it's an environmentally friendly way to read your favorite publications and that many of its digital magazines are enriched with links and videos.

Tips & Warnings

• Keep in mind that websites like Mygazines are still untested and raise copyright concerns. A number of technology sites and blogs have predicted that it won't survive an onslaught of copyright lawsuits, but it remains on the Web.

Resources

• Mygazines
• Zinio
• Magatopia