I Discovered Online Magazine Archives

Posted on March 2, 2008 2 Comments

Although I consider myself a digital sort of guy with my affection for RSS feeds, eBooks and life via the web browser, I have to admit that I still subscribe to a handful of (*gasp*) paper magazines. At the end of the day, I just enjoy reading something in bed that doesn’t involve backlighting and batteries. Surely that’s not a bad thing, right?

The challenge with those paper magazines is that I inevitably come across an article that I want to save or refer to in the future. I have this “process” that I follow for those:

Dog-ear the page so that I can find it later
Pile up magazines for months under the night stand
Just before wife pitches the stack of magazines, run through them and pull out the pages I was interested in.
Stack those pages in a manila folder in hopes that I rediscover them someday (yep, I still fail at a few core GTD concepts!)

Earlier today I noticed another stack was headed for the trash and realized it was time to do steps 3 and 4. And then a thought (apparently lost) bubbled up: Surely these magazines have online archives?

Turns out that they do — or at least, the two I was concerned with today do: Maximum PC and Discover magazine.

Now I just find the article I had dog-eared and then copy/paste it into my digital notebook of choice. Today I’m doing it with Evernote beta, but it would certainly work with OneNote, Google Notebook or Zoho Notebook as well.

No more paper piling up and now I have nicely tagged and searchable stuff just waiting for me to need or refer to it.

Considering that I was actually going to spend an afternoon with the clippings and a scanner… I feel pretty good about this solution!

Tags: Evernote, google-notebook, GTD, onenote, zoho-notebook