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Monday, September 16, 2013

Managing digital Subscriptions

Sample view from a newsreaderAs professionals, we all need to keep up to date with industry knowledge through professional and trade publications. Few years back, the paper publications are the norm and one can always file them and study them when one gets free time.  Nowadays, institutions have started offering digital publications, with advantage of lower price and fastest delivery(over Internet) and  availability in multiple formats.  Unfortunately for people habituated to reading paper copies,  switching over to electronic magazine does feel cumbersome. While magazine publishers have tried to mimic the feel for a paper copy, by providing 2 up views (two pages view),  giving animation of turning a page, user has to play with zoom settings and scroll settings  to be able to read an article.  I feel most comfortable when I can read the article in HTML format, though I have to click on Figures to be able to read and understand them. Unfortunately not all publishers provide HTML views of articles (IEEE is an exception)


Graphic for Atom Feed
Feed icon
Another aspect is about  keeping up with latest issues of magazines . Institutions send out an email when the new issue is ready. You may file it in a 'Read and Reference folder'. If you subscribe to several magazines, websites, blogs, it becomes very difficult to manage the flow. Recently I switched over to using Feedly  Newsreader as a way to  get to the feeds  from all the sites of interest.  It makes it easier to browse the feeds  and read articles of interest. Still you may need to select some for later reading, in which case, you can use the newsreader 'save for later' feature.

BTW, if you would like to keep up with updates on my website,  you can click on the feed icon on the top left of my website and add the URL you get into your newsreader.  


The applications also  allow you to share articles of interest using social media.   Do you have any other tips? Please share by commenting on the blog or where you see the reference to this in Social media. Thanks





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