i-Mag

Regular blog readers may recall at the end of November I was undertaking some 'spring cleaning' under the watchful eye of SWMBO and I was experiencing some spousal pressure to cull my rather large collection of magazines (so far skillfully resisted!). In all fairness she does have a point and there are only so many crates a man should be filling with magazines that rarely get revisited. Consequently whilst there are a number of good wargames magazines on the market I have restricted my only subscription to one, Wargames Illustrated, which has (IMHO) been consistently good to excellent since Battleground have taken over the running.

I do have a soft spot for Battlegames and a while back purchased the 'motherlode' of the first 26 issues in PDF format for future consumption and following a work business case for a tablet being accepted I have transferred this collection into my iPad library. Whilst I am still trying to work out the work benefits (not sure 3G is a great idea as I am always contactable now!) I am really taken with reading wargames mags electronically now. In fact I might have become addicted...

So when Big Lee's Miniature Adventures favourably reviewed the relaunched Wargames, Soldiers & Strategy mag I decided to download a PDF issue which costs just under half what the paper magazine does. Big Lee was right, it is an excellent magazine these days with some really good columns by Rick Priestly and Richard (Lardie) Clarke so I ordered an electronic subscription and the back issues since the relaunch. Excellent stuff and lots of hugely enjoyable reading (conveniently wherever the iPad is and not having to hunt out a paper magazine, indeed I would say I am reading the PDF more than I am the paper WI...).

The publishers in confirming my sub kindly gave me a 10% of my next order... Damn! With the pre-relaunch issues at a paltry £1.86 and 10% off that I went PDF crazy and bought the lot. I am slowly working my way through them and whilst they are not as good as the current issues and have some wonderful Spanglish in, they are proving to be more interesting (and useful) that I thought (though worryingly I keep flipping from the PDF to the internet browser to check out companies miniatures and have manfully resisted the lure of 20mm Stalingrad Germans and 28mm Samurai tonight).

I have even uploaded a couple of Ragnarok's and (having typset it with the PDF in mind) I must say that I think the full colour Rag 59 PDF looks pretty fine on the iPad!

It's actually quite funny it has taken me so long to make this step as I have for the last year or so switch most of my music purchasing from CD's to MP3 downloads due to storage issues (a much bigger problem than the magazines unfortunately) and have been comfortable with that.

Whilst I doubt I will completely switch over to digital only for magazines or books, I am taken with the convenience of the electronic format and suspect that one day soon this will be the more common medium and paper, by and large, redundant in most cases.