Enter Next Issue, which has been referred to as Netflix for magazines. It offers a way to get a multitude of magazines, popular big name magazines at that, all for one low price a month. I’m not quite sure how they manage to be able to sell these subscriptions all under that one low price, but I’m grateful. It’s going to save me money.
Signing up for Next Issue requires you to set up an account online at nextissue.com. You will have your choice of two unlimited plans that will be charged to you on a monthly basis. The $9.99 plan gives you a very large selection of magazines to choose from. You may download as many magazines from this list as you want. The $14.99 plan gives you an additional handful of magazines to choose from, yet they explain that more magazines are being added all the time, assumably to both lists. Signing up for one of the plans gives you a 30-day free trial period. You can cancel at any time and not be charged. After selecting a plan and filling out the contact and billing info, it directs you to a free download of the Next Issue app.
Once you have downloaded the Next Issue app and signed in to your account, it asks you to select the magazines to add in to your account. Again, you can select as many as you want. It’s just a matter of clicking on the icons of the magazines.
For the thirty days free, if you’re a very prolific reader, you can actually get a lot of reading done and really make it worth your while. The last issue of the magazines aren’t the only ones available. The issues go all the way back to January. January! While for the Wired subscription that just means one each month, for a weekly subscription such as People, it goes all the way to January as well. Even if you paid the first month, $15 would be worth that.
Each different magazine works a little differently than the next. Much of it seems to depend on the magazine and its individual features. The magazines include interactive features like most digital magazines. In this review of cheap hotel apps, clicking on the logo of the app shows you a graphic of the “inside” of the app. To read more of an article with this magazine, you sweep up, and to go the next article you sweep to the left.
People Magazine works a little differently than Wired. Instead of sweeping up to read more, you just sweep to the left to read more pages, just as you do to go to the next article. The ads seem to be the same ones that would be included in the print version. Again, it includes a lot of interactive features. By clicking on this picture, you can flip back and forth between a before and after view of an area affected by the wildfires. You can also click the links on the right to contact agencies to lend your help. The one part of the interactivity that didn’t work so well was volume control. I could barely hear the videos and audio clips. I expect the volume to be fixed in a future version. Even with that not working well, the bulk subscription rate here is extremely worth it. Even if I paid the $15 right now instead of getting the free 30-day trial first, it would still be quite a bargain. Before the Internet, I used to pay at least $15 a month for magazines. I stopped reading magazines, filling my time with Internet activities. This allows me to get back to reading magazines, a prior favorite activity. I don’t have to get my fill through several different apps. I can do it all right here with Next Issue.
