Downloading Issuu magazines

I don't know about you, but I like to read my magazines away from my desk. I still think of them as 'recreation' and associate my desk with 'work'.

So now that so many magazines have gone online, it annoys me when I am unable to download them and read them on my tablet. I have to be connected to the web, and read the file within my browser, which has limited zoom capabilities.

The Wild Tomato, a local magazine which provides lovely local content, decided to go weekly online in the Covid-19 crisis. Using issuu, that would have worked just fine, but instead they have prevented the readership from downloading any pages. The issuu reader is horrible, clunky, and has only a minute two-up format that no one can read, or a zoom that is so close that you have no idea where you are on the page.

If you are finding this is an issue for you, I have a workaround. Go to https://issuudownload.net/ and enter the URL for any magazine on the issuu site that you want to download. While the resulting pdf download won't be super high quality, and will be only images of each page (ie, no text), it will enable you to read on any device you chose, providing you have Acrobat reader.

If magazine companies would only talk to their readership how they like to read things, they would get a much clearer idea of how to keep their readership happy, and all these silly work-arounds would no longer be necessary.


Sam