Sunday, December 13, 2009

Building Design and Construction Magazines: Paper or online?

I'm torn between real, traditional, hard copy paper magazines and the online versions.

I get countless magazines and newsletters (most of them free) having to do with building design and construction.  I don't read very many of them cover to cover, but I skim most of them and read articles or advertisements that get my attention.  Because of the wealth of information I'm exposed to in magazines I think I "learn something new every day" as the Northern Illinois Public Radio slogan goes.

The great thing about online magazines is that when I'm through with them, I can dispose of them with a few keystrokes.  There's nothing material to dispose of, nothing to be hauled off and put in a landfill.  However, even as addicted as I am to computers and web surfing,  I tire of staring at a computer screen.

Which brings me to the pleasures of hard copy magazines.  True, they have to be disposed of, and the fact that most of them are now free and thus everybody has a subscription, means that they're increasingly hard to recycle to other people. Still, I love hard copy magazines.  I can put the magazine down, pick it up hours or days later, and resume reading.  Most importantly, I can read magazines in my recliner.  Oh, and the hard copy magazine doesn't lock up like my computer with Internet Explorer's heinous "Not Responding" message.  I don't have to reboot a hard copy magazine or start a new web browsing session.  Wish me luck here - I just switched to Google's Chrome web browser a few days ago, totally frustrated with Internet Explorer.  So far it seems much faster and much less buggy than Internet Explorer.

Which way do you prefer to read magazines- paper or online?

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