Paper magazines

[Daehawk]

Dont care for digital. Im talking old school paper ones. Is there a place to buy them these days? Im interested in PC gaming and tech mags. I know Barnes and Nobel sells both US PC Gamer and UK ones and a few others but Im not driving that far for a magazine or to be in those people. Also just what PC gaming mags are there now? In the 90s I used to buy 5 - 7 different ones. Most are gone I think now. My favorite, CGW, was a sad thing to see pass. Also I used to get a lot of mags free through Fatwallet but they seem gone now too.

Anyways all this home stuff is giving me a slight urge to have some mags to view while Im in bed at night. So whats out there and where?

[Kraken]

I never go to retail places anymore so I have no idea about the status of newsstands nowadays. Bookstores might be your best bet. Airports.

We subscribe to Science News, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Esquire, where I get all my fashion advice. We also get "free with membership" zines from AARP, WGBH, AAA, and the Boston Globe sunday magazine. There's always something interesting within arm's reach.

[Blackhawk]

I get current news from the internet. By the time it is in a print mag, it's a month old.

For paper magazines (mostly for bathroom reading), I used to subscribe to both National Geographic and Scientific American. I let those lapse. Now, once a year or so when I make it to the comic shop (it's two hours away), I'll buy a few copies of old Starlog magazines for a buck or so each. It's really fun seeing what people were saying about things we know so well back when they were just rumors. I read a story just last week about how people were planning to boycott Star Trek 2 if the rumors that Spock died were true.

[Isgrimnur]

https://www.discountmags.com/

Sign up for the newsletter and you'll see some good sales.

[dbt1949]

After a twenty year absence I got a couple of subscriptions to model train magazines. I was more than a little shocked at how thin they were, Don't think I'll be renewing.

[Kraken]

Esquire keeps auto-renewing and I keep not canceling it because it's cheap and I forget. They don't run the long-form journalism and fiction that they used to run, and the redesign they did this spring borders on unreadable. It bills to a credit card that I don't use anymore. I ought to cancel them both.

With a couple of short interruptions due to poverty, I've subscribed to Science News since I was 14. They open every issue by updating an article that ran 50 years ago. I am a year away from having read them the first time around.

[LawBeefaroni]

With a couple of short interruptions due to poverty, I've subscribed to Science News since I was 14. They open every issue by updating an article that ran 50 years ago. I am a year away from having read them the first time around.

Oh, that's awesome!


Scientific American does something similar, I think they do 50, 100, and 150.

[LawBeefaroni]

So whats out there and where?

Walgreen's/CVS usually has a magazine rack. Walmart I would assume too.


Grocery store checkouts always have a few.

Specific to PC gaming and tech? Not sure.
PC Gamer appears to still be out there.

[Smoove_B]

I get current news from the internet. By the time it is in a print mag, it's a month old.

Yeah, my dad still reads the printed paper daily and gets like a dozen magazines mailed to him. Whenever he asks if I heard about [X], it's always a story that's at least a week old, possibly longer. It's not me being snobby, it's just that I get 99% of my information online now. Sometimes I do miss reading actual magazine, but I also don't miss the clutter.

[coopasonic]

I've had a car mag subscription for most of my life. It was Car and Driver for a long time but a few years ago I switched to Motor Trend. It's probably time I let it drop. My enthusiasm for cars has waned significantly.

[ImLawBoy]

I get current news from the internet. By the time it is in a print mag, it's a month old.

Yeah, my dad still reads the printed paper daily and gets like a dozen magazines mailed to him. Whenever he asks if I heard about [X], it's always a story that's at least a week old, possibly longer. It's not me being snobby, it's just that I get 99% of my information online now. Sometimes I do miss reading actual magazine, but I also don't miss the clutter.

Magazines for breaking news are obviously worthless. Magazines have their value in going in depth on a topic. Not that online sources can't do that either, but if you're reading paper magazines for breaking news, you're doing it wrong.

[AWS260]

We still subscribe to a few paper magazines:

• Scientific American (perfect for a science-loving non-scientist like me; I grew up with this magazine)

• National Geographic (a nice reminder that top-notch professional photography still looks better on the page than the screen)

• The Economist (great for a global view of current events, including major events that get very little attention in the U.S.)

• Entertainment Weekly (we should probably let this one drop)

• Senet (a new boardgaming quarterly)

I think the last physical PC gaming mag I read was Edge, but that was probably more than 5 years ago.

[Jeff V]

The company that I used to work spun off a division that did book and magazine printing. In a merger effort to survive, it was judged that the merger would stifle competition (because there's so much competition in the dead-tree printing business...it's been contracting toward a single provider for a long time). So merger was canceled, company is now in bankruptcy and not expected to survive. This will idle dozens of plants that printed such things.

I think it's been a dozen years since a non-junkmail magazine appeared in my mailbox. Somewhere around I have some old issues of Skeptical Inquirer from a subscription I bought for my dad after I had already abandon the format. Once upon a time, I subscribed to 20-some odd magazines, including a lot of industry rags.

[Anonymous Bosch]

My initial experiences of 8-bit 'computer gaming' in the early home computer era typically revolved around those hefty antiquated computer magazines that used to include umpteen pages of type-in program listings. They were written in BASIC or a combination of a BASIC loader and machine code, and I can only imagine how many tedious hours I wasted as a youngster typing in those programs and the subsequent process of error-correction and bug-fixing. But if nothing else, it did give me a keen eye for spotting my own mistakes and in no uncertain terms drilled into me the truth of the old adage, "Everybody makes mistakes—that's why they put erasers on pencils."

[em2nought]

After a twenty year absence I got a couple of subscriptions to model train magazines.

You and Rod Stewart
I thought this was interesting. Oh man, he should have been on an episode of Big Bang Theory with Sheldon.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/a ... ailwa.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM9OV5JCn8E

[dbt1949]

He has a great layout. Not too many people go for the big city look.

[Daehawk]

My wife got me a sub to NatGeo a few years back. Not much I liked in them unlike the old days. I guess Ive had many years to learn most of the world since I was a kid

I also got those mags as a kid with the DIY BASIC programs in them for my Atari 800xl.

I just like paper mags. I like holding them, the pics, the smell. I get used to reviewers. Besides I cant hold my desktop in my hands in bed and get sleepy with it.

Thanks for the ideas. Ill check into them. Going to that webpage now. Im sure it wont be like the 90s when there was no internet news. Back then the mags told the future. Some previews were multiple pages. I think the Planets Edge one was 6 pages. I sat in the mall food court dreaming of that game while reading the preview.

[Jeff V]

He has a great layout. Not too many people go for the big city look.

It's best when modeling epic disasters by doing a Gomez Addams with it.

[Apollo]

I have a lot of subscriptions even after making serious cutbacks over the past year. Car & Driver, Motor Trend, Time, National Geographic History, and Corvette are the only ones I subscribe to now, but that's after cancelling National Geographic, The Week, Mustang Monthly, Military History, Archaeology, Road and Track, Automobile, and Hemmings Motor News just in the last 12 months.

I think I'm finally getting control of my habit. Time and Motor Trend are the next two on my chopping block, but I've still got about a year remaining on those two.

[Kraken]

Back in the day I used to alternate between Time, Newsweek, and US News & World Reports as my weekly news zines. I didn't realize any of them were still making paper magazines.

[Paradroid]

I've subscribed to Private Eye for as long as I remember. I don't read it very much because it's too depressing to see the shit our politicians and general elite get away with constantly. But it's important that someone is doing this kind of journalism so I'll subscribe to the bitter end.

I've had various subscriptions in the recent past, like The Spectator and various Linux magazines. Currently the only other one I subscribe to is 2000AD.

[Lassr]

I subscribed to PC Gamer for years but let it lapse when they stopped doing the $19 a year deal. It's now in the $30's. They run deals for the UK print version a lot of but the US version rarely. I do prefer a paper magazine in my hand over my kindle or internet, same with books.

[Holman]

We've curbed all of our paper media except for the NYT and the New York Review of Books (as my MIL prefers to read these on paper as she has for decades).

We've got digital subscriptions to most of what we used to get in the mail.

[Exodor]

https://www.discountmags.com/

Sign up for the newsletter and you'll see some good sales.

Thank you for this - my cheap subscription to Rolling Stone that I got from a similar site ran out this year and they wanted some crazy price to renew it ($50 a year, I think?). Unfortunately it's the same price on that site. I guess I'll pass for now.

My subscriptions are down to Wired and The Atlantic which are both good through 2022. I like paper magazines for reading while I eat.

[Isgrimnur]

https://www.discountmags.com/

Sign up for the newsletter and you'll see some good sales.

Thank you for this - my cheap subscription to Rolling Stone that I got from a similar site ran out this year and they wanted some crazy price to renew it ($50 a year, I think?). Unfortunately it's the same price on that site. I guess I'll pass for now.

Looking at my emails, the last time they had a discount on RS was 2017. Seems like they've become very proud of their publication since then.