One of the things I do with magazines that I read and want to keep is I cut out the pages I’m interested in and scan them and store them as JPEGs. This way I have a digital copy of the material I’m interested in and I can recycle the rest.

eBay and frequent flier miles are definitely the best way to get magazine subs though.

If you don’t fly enough on a particular airline to get anything more valuable, you can pay for all of your annual magazine subscriptions with one flight.

One, I would suggest befriending someone who works for such a company if you can – they get staff discounts on subscriptions (mine was 40% off) and can often ‘hook you up’.

Two, yes most magazines have good websites now so it may be worth just looking at those unless you prefer the magazine format. (Also better for the environment.)

Three, a magazine swap is a great idea. Magazine swaps are crucial in the small country I come from, with freight charges making US mags four to five times the original cover charge.

And finally magazine companies usually do special promotions around Mother’s Day, Christmas etc with bonus gifts or discounts – always the best time to sign up.

http://www.discountmagazines.com

including Kiplinger’s, which is a great magazine that anyone reading this blog would find useful. I also get Parent’s, Outside, Home, and Working Mother all for $6/year. For $6 year, I get my money’s worth. We don’t have TV, so magazines are nice.

From that site I also get two very expensive but necessary magazines for us: Fine Homebuilding and Fine Woodworking for $23/year instead of $38. A fun magazine that we enjoy is American History, also purchased at a discount there.

It’s too hard to keep a book flat for reading while I eat. I avoid web browsing in the morning, because I am usually about to go to work and spend 8 hours looking at a monitor.

So magazines it is. I get The New Yorker, Wired, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Natural History (from the American Natural History Museum in New York), and a few others that I probably should drop because I don’t always read them.

I also get Mother Earth News, but I save that for bedtime reading.

The magazines I would keep (of those I subscribe to) are: The New Yorker, Harper’s, Cook’s Illustrated, and Consumer Reports.

HOWEVER: The New Yorker is basically available for free on-line, and both Cook’s and CR offer web site subscriptions at lower cost than subscribing to the magazine. Since these site subscriptions give convenient access to past issues, they’re very tempting.

For magazines like the New Yorker, why not check out your local public or university library? (Sometimes you can sign up to non-local libraries, like the New York Public Library whose databases you can access using a Research Libraries ACCESS card.) Other than reading the current issue in the library, you can often access the electronic subscription from home. I just checked and my library does in fact have an electronic subscription to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly. In some cases it might only be plain HTML text, no graphics.

GJ

In recent years, I cut down on my magazine subscriptions too for the same reason, I used to get 7 or 8, but now only get Scientific American and Sky and Telescope. I buy other magazines at the newstand, if the mood strikes. Surprisingly, I don’t think that I save a great deal of money, because the cost of a subscription is typically dramatically reduced compared to the newstand price of a single issue… oh, well.

However, I do subscribe to the New Yorker. I have yet to find another source of such consistently high quality writing (on or offline), and even though most of the New Yorker is available online, if I’m going to read a 5000 word essay I’d rather not do it on my computer screen. I highly recommend it.

There will always be a place for the printed page, but with the even playing field of the Internet I just can’t see how many of the magazines can compete off line. Unless the target audience of the magazine caters mainly to non-Internet users.