Recently I’ve received a lot of email from Kalmbach pushing their digital editions. I finally bit when they offered Model Railroader for $29 for a year. Note that this is only the digital edition.
The reason I wanted digital is that I really don’t want to keep all of the paper copies.
The digital edition is not quite where I want it to be yet, but it is pretty good. More on that later.
The digital edition is fulfilled through Zinio - no matter where you buy the subscription from.
Once you get it, you can run it on any device. For instance, I can access it on my Kindle Fire or from my PC; they also support Apple devices. Of course, they have LOTS of different magazines to choose from.
There are a number of nice features.
- Naturally you get the digital version of the entire magazine and can easily zoom in and out.
- I didn’t check ALL of the ads, but if there was a web address listed in the ad, you just click on it (or touch your screen) and you go to the browser for that location. I thought this was very cool; it seems like I usually read the hard copy in bed at night, and naturally I don’t have my computer with me- of course that changes with the Kindle.
- Many of the articles have a “text” button; so you can read the article without any pictures.
- There’s a table of contents section that I can easily access, so I don’t have to “page” back to the front of the magazine.
- There’s also a filmstrip type view available that allows you to quickly go from one page to another.
- You get notified (via email) that the next issue is available, so you will be one of the first to get it.
I also tried it on Garden Railways. They allowed me to add 6 issues to my current subscription for only $6.
I doubt if I’ll get the paper version after it expires.
Earlier, I mentioned that it’s not quite “there” yet. A few years back I bought the 75 years of Model Railroader on DVD.
The search function is great as you search across all 75 years – including advertisements.
When I start a project, I’ll just key in a related word and see what I get. You can limit the search – here’s a piece of the screen showing the search input. All of the issues are displayed on the right side, and you can scroll through them or double-click on one to read it directly.
Once you double click on an issue you have several options to view it. You can get a list view – which just gives you details for each article. Thumbnail view which displays a thumbnail of each page of the magazine, sort of like the issue thumbnails above. You can view a single page, or two pages at a time. The mouse wheel allows you to scroll through the pages, but there’s also a standard slider, as well as next page and previous page buttons. You can zoom in, show a page actual size, or fit it to your window.
The resolution is not quite as high as I would like, but it is certainly good enough. It’s much better on the digital editions.
What would be nice is if you could somehow merge the digital editions you receive monthly with the 75 year collection. This would allow you to search over your own collection.
