The holiday season can be a perfect time to flip through some magazines, whether you are traveling by plane or train or just looking to fill a few minutes of down time at an in-law’s house. Instead of spending lots of money at an airport newsstand, you can get magazines for free at your local library. And thanks to the digital services available at modern libraries, you can download full copies of magazines, for free, on your iPad. There are different apps that offer this service so you need to find out which one your library uses. My library, the New Orleans Public Library, uses an app called Flipster. (A similar app used by some libraries is RBdigital.)
The Flipster service is not limited to public libraries. It also works with certain academic libraries, schools, companies, and governmental entities.
Although you don’t have to visit a branch of your library to download magazines to the Flipster app, you do need to have an active library card. Once you follow the instructions in Flipster to authenticate through your local library, you can then use the Explore tab at the bottom left to see all of the magazines that are offered.
The Flipster service offers access to almost 1,500 titles, but you’ll only see the ones to which your local library has provided access. I see that I currently have access to over 80 titles through the New Orleans Public Library, and the selection is quite good, including:
- Bloomberg Businessweek
- Bon Appétit
- Brides
- Bust
- Car and Driver
- Condé Nast Traveler
- Consumer Reports
- Cosmopolitan
- Country Living
- Eating Well
- Ebony
- Elle
- Entertainment Weekly
- Essence
- Esquire
- Fast Company
- Food & Wine
- Forbes
- Good Housekeeping
- GQ
- Harper’s Bazaar
- Health
- Highlights
- InStyle
- Kiplinger’s
- Louisiana Life
- Marie Claire
- Martha Stewart Living
- Men’s Health
- Men’s Journal
- Money
- Mother Jones
- Motortrend
- National Geographic
- New Orleans
- The New Yorker
- Newsweek
- O, the Oprah Magazine
- Out
- Outdoor Photographer
- Paper
- Parents
- PCWorld
- People
- Popular Mechanics
- Popular Science
- Rolling Stone
- Runner’s World
- Shape
- Southern Living
- Sports Illustrated
- Time
- Travel + Leisure
- Us
- Vanity Fair
- Vogue
- Wired
- Woman’s Day
I think that most folks will be able to find something that they consider worth downloading.
When you select a magazine, you then have a choice of either downloading the current issue or a back issue.
You can see all of the magazines that you have downloaded in the My Shelf tab. Some titles expire after a certain amount of time, and the amount of time varies depending upon the title. But you can download an issue again, and the app shows you when an expiration date is coming soon. Using percentages below each magazine icon, the Flipster app gives you a sense of how much of the magazine you have already viewed.
Once you select a specific issue of a magazine, you can read it. In landscape mode, you can read two pages at a time, which is nice because some magazine content was designed to spread across two pages.
Or you can turn your iPad to portrait mode and read one page at a time. In either orientation, you can pinch to zoom to make things larger. And many magazines feature hyperlinks within the issue so that, for example, you can tap on a story title on the cover on in the index and then the app will jump to that page.
In full-screen mode, you just see the content of the magazine. When not in the full-screen mode, you can see menu options, such as a table of contents.
You can bookmark pages of a magazine. You can also enter a text view mode in which you just focus on the words. In that mode, you can copy text and paste it elsewhere to quote it.
My only significant complaint about the Flipster app is that you cannot search for text within a magazine. This is curious because there is also a version of Flipster that works in a web browser (either on a computer or an iPad), and that version gives you the option to search.
I really like using the Flipster app. It is a great way to read some of my favorite magazines. It is also fun to browse through magazines that I would never purchase but which might contain an interesting article. And to be honest, sometimes I will decide to give my brain a break and I’ll just flip through a magazine mostly just to look at the pictures.
Magazines are not the only digital assets that you can download thanks to your public library. You can also use apps to download audiobooks, videos, comic books, and of course, books. For example, before I started watching the show Watchmen on HBO (which was incredible, by the way — I recommend it), I used the Hoopla app to download and read the Watchmen graphic novel, which made the television show (which is somewhat of a sequel) even more enjoyable. But when I am traveling and sometimes have only short periods of time to read, a magazine is perfect, and the Flipster app along with the large screen of my 12.9″ iPad Pro makes for a fantastic reading experience.
Click here to get Flipster (free): 