Readly: Welcome to the Netflix of magazine subscriptions

If you subscribe to 4 or 5 (or more) magazines, there’s a good chance you’re going to like Readly. I like to think of Readly as the Netflix of magazine subscriptions. In other words, instead of subscribing to magazines individually, you pay a flat monthly price ($9.99/month) for instant access to Readly’s entire catalog of over 1,000 magazines.

Depending on what magazines you enjoy, this can be a really good deal. For instance, I enjoy reading The Week, which costs $59.50/year. That’s nearly half of what I would pay for one year of unlimited access to Readly’s entire catalog.

If you can not see the embedded video above please use the following link: Readly- unlimited magazines on your tablet or smartphone

Also like Netflix, your magazines are delivered digitally, not via the U.S. Mail. With Readly, you can read your magazines on your computer via a web browser or on your tablet or smartphone via the Readly app. Readly will work on your Apple device (iPhone, iPad), Android device, Windows device or on your Kindle Fire. I find that using the Readly app on my tablet (iPad) works best.

Readly’s Catalog

Readly has a pretty decent catalog of magazine titles but they definitely do not have every magazine you can think of. They did have several selections I enjoy such as The Week, Consumer Reports, Inc., Forbes, ESPN, Fast Company and PC Magazine. But when I searched for other popular titles such as National Geographic, People, Time, Real Simple, Entertainment Weekly and Martha Stewart Living, none of these were in Readly’s catalog.

To find new magazines, you can use Readly’s search feature to search by title or Readly’s category list to browse all available titles in each category.

If you want to view the entire list of titles Readly offers, you can search their catalog online.

One other thing to keep in mind when considering Readly’s value. Once you become a subscriber, you can go back and read older issues of all of their magazines. So if you want to catch up on last year’s issues of Consumer Reports, you can do it the second you become a paid subscriber.

Reading digitally

Receiving all of your magazines in digital format has several advantages. For one, you can start reading a magazine on your tablet and finish reading it on your PC. Readly keeps track of where you left off in each magazine. This also makes things a breeze if you read multiple magazines since you never have to remember where you left off in any given magazine. No more bookmarks or dog-eared pages!

If you share Readly with your family (which you are allowed to do), each family member can have his or her own profile. A profile consists of your name, male/female selection and your birth year. This helps keep things more organized as well as helps Readly recommend titles that are more suited to each family member’s preferences.

While reading an individual magazine on your tablet, you can pinch zoom in on content or tap the screen for additional features like searching within the magazine, toggling a magazine as your favorite or setting a digital bookmark.

You can choose between viewing one page at a time or a two-page spread although I found the two-page spread on my iPad just a little to small to read without zooming in.

You can also easily jump to any page in a magazine by tapping the screen and then swiping through the index of thumbnail pages that appear at the bottom of the screen. Very helpful when it comes to skipping a big section of ads in some magazines.

Finally, if you mark specific magazine titles as favorites, Readly can notify you when new issues of these magazines arrive.

Note: The Readly subscription service mentioned above was provided to me at no cost or a discounted cost in exchange for my unbiased review. To get started with your own Readly subscription, visit the Readly website.