Locus Goes Digital

I found out this weekend through Charles Stross's blog that Locus, the magazine of the science fiction/fantasy field, is now available in digital format. (Of course, the paper version is still available too.) I used to subscribe to it, but when Alex was born, I didn't have enough time to read it and let my subscription lapse. Now that I have my Kindle, I can find more reading time. I decided to give the digital version a trial run and signed up for a six-month digital subscription for $27.00. It became active later that day; I got an e-mail with the information I needed to download the first issue to my computer. Unfortunately, I can't get the Kindle app on my laptop to sync up with my Kindle, so I connected them with the USB cord and copied the issue over. (It's not too hard if a, you know where the magazine is stored on your computer and b, you remember to place it into the right folder on your Kindle.)

There are still pictures in the digital version; if you read on your computer, the pictures are in color. There are also ads, though some of them are small and hard to read on the Kindle. The pictures do make for some odd page breaks, and sometimes there's just one line of text beneath the ad or picture. It looks like there are hyperlinks in the table of contents and in other parts of the magazine as well. I'm about 60% of the way through. I think it'll be a couple more months until I'm ready to decide if the digital version is better than the paper version. Still, it's better than not reading Locus at all.