Monday, November 08, 2010

LitMags on Kindle

I gave in to the Kindle because I love gadgets and I love reading and because I've run out of bookshelf space. I know that I won't stop buying books from Indie bookstores because I also love them. But anything I would have ordered from Amazon or B&N is now most likely headed for my Kindle (sorry about that, B&N--the Nook looks nice, but in the end I thought the Kindle would work better for me).

It turns out, though, that I may be using the Kindle even more than I thought I would. Newspapers! Magazines! I haven't yet ordered the New York Times but I'm sure I will. Many of the magazines that are delivered to me now are on Kindle and I love the idea of not having stacks of magazines lying around.

Plus litmags! I have just ordered One Story for Kindle. I used to subscribe and then I didn't, but this seems a good reason to start again. I see that Narrative is available on Kindle also, but I'm not sure if the content is any different from what I see online for free, so I haven't ordered that. Are other litmags on Kindle?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Cliff

If your Kindle can get to the Internet, might try looking at my online lit mag The Summerset Review (www.summersetreview.org). A few people told me it renders rather nicely, but I have not seen it myself. You might try seeing how well your Prime Number mag shows up on it too. I think many online lit mags might render nicely, and no subscription needed!

Joe Levens

Unknown said...

Good points, Joe. I'll give that a try, although my signal at home is kind of weak.

Marc Gerstein said...

I subscribed to Narrative on Kindle but canceled when I saw they had the New yorker disease; a tendency to publish advertorials (they call them novel excerpts) instead of short stories. I find i can just as easily look for original stories on the narrative web site, download them as pdfs, and then have them converted by Amazon to Kindle format for less money than the cost of a Narrative subscription.

Magazines on Kindle are great. Don't underestimate the benefit of font adjustment (I can actually READ the stuff now). Some carp about the absence of color, etc. but I'm finding that with just a series of text nuggets, unaccompanied by distractions in hard copy or the web, I'm reading more of the periodicals on Kindle than I ever did in the past.