I’ve been trying to read various magazines – for example, The Economist – on some form of eReader for a few years now.
At first I couldn’t do it because they didn’t have electronic editions. Then they did, but only online. Then they offered electronic versions you could subscribe to, but only for Apple products.
Now I can find a lot of them in online bookstores – for Barnes and Noble, or Kobo – but the subscriptions only let you read them on each bookstore’s tablets.
But there’s a workaround for the Kobo eReaders that I wanted to share.
It takes advantage of Pocket, which lets you save web articles for later reading. Turns out that Pocket is integrated into all of Kobo’s eReaders, so any articles you save to your Pocket account will show up on your Kobo.
Here’s how you can read any magazine or newspaper that has an online version on your eReader:
- Sign up for a Pocket account.
- Download and install the Pocket plugin for your web browser.
- Go to the homepage of the magazine you want to read (e.g., economist.com)
- Subscribe to the magazine (if you haven't already).
- With your subscription, navigate to the "print edition" version of the website.
- Now you can start saving articles for reading. Either right-click on the link to the article and select "Save to Pocket" or open the article and click the "Save to Pocket" icon in your browser's toolbar.
- Wait for the popup that tells you the article has been saved to Pocket.
- Go to your ereader. Navigate to the "Articles from Pocket" section.
- Sign in to Pocket if you haven't already.
- Your saved article(s) should sync to the ereader. Tap any one of them to read it!
