As someone who reads a lot, I feel pangs of guilt every time I cart magazines off to the recycling bin. And I feel worse when I look around my office at the litter of magazines, clipped-out articles, and snippets of columns and news articles with URLs that I’m determined to enter into Outlook.
As a former executive organizer and member of the National Association of Professional Organizers (NAPO) I have the ability to organize all this, but (thankfully) life is all about choices. I just don’t want to receive all this information in paper form and feel pressured to process it. My New Year’s business resolution was to stem the tide of paper, little by little, by changing what I do with all the information and other communications I receive.
When Business Week had sent me at least three renewal notices, I decided to take the plunge and see if I could get it online. Within minutes I made sure that 52 magazines and countless ripped out articles a year will no longer show up in my office. And it opened me up to a whole world of magazines online – from Zinio, a digital publisher of some of the major business and general interest magazines.
Just download a reader, and pay for your subscription (less than paper, as it should be) and you’re ready to read. The magazines are full color, the ads are included, and it’s easy to check out tables of contents and navigate to whatever you want to read. You can, of course, print any article, and most magazines allow you to send articles to friends and colleagues – smart, because they’re bound to sign up when they see how easy and portable this solution is.
And there’s an added bonus – the site includes a free business magazine center. Just enter in information about your industry and business, and you can “qualify” to receive free trade publications. But be careful—some of them aren’t digital and you could be starting the paper piles all over again!
Comment Preview