Science & Technology Magazines

Go Digital and Save Money.
Subscribing to foreign science and technology magazines from India is very expensive, says Biman Basu, former editor of Science Reporter. In addition copies can get lost in the mail.

His solution: downloadable digital editions. Not only can articles from many such magazines be read on their websites for free, their digital editions (you can subscribe to them using your credit card) are much cheaper than their printed versions. For instance, the British weekly New Scientist costs $51 for an annual digital subscription but $218 for the print edition. Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, costs $28 for digital versus $58 for print. For Scientific American it’s $39.95 and $55.

Many current articles from Psychology Today and National Geographic magazines, too, can be read for free at their websites (do a Google search using magazine titles in each case). And a free weekly read to keep your tech-edge sharp is Walt Mossberg’s “Personal Technology” column in the Wall Street Journal site ptech.wsj.com. But paying for a digital subscription automatically downloads the current issue on your PC and lets you access archived articles in back issues too.

“One bonus,” adds Basu, “digital editions save you 100% shelf-space!” but care should be taken to organize the soft copies of these files.