My favorite new way to read magazines
Fun fact: I was my high school’s top magazine salesperson for four years straight, highly motivated by the prize of being “Principal for the Day.” I got to hang out in the front office all day, order pizza for lunch, pull my friends out of class, play music over the loudspeakers between classes: it was a high schooler’s dream. It was the only fundraiser that my Catholic high school put on, and I fully leaned into it–not only by showing up at my dentist’s and orthodontist’s office (aka magazine seller heaven), but also by convincing my mom that I needed subscriptions to People, Teen Vogue and Seventeen.
Ever since then, I’ve harbored a love of magazines. For a while, my dream was to write for a fashion magazine in New York City–and even as I shifted professionally into tech and then travel, my guilty pleasure has always been subscriptions to Vogue, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire. Even though I converted to a Kindle long ago, it’s taken me a while to switch to reading magazines digitally–mostly because I didn’t really understand the economics of how it would work. Were there still subscriptions? Could I just buy the latest issue? It seemed easier to just pick up whatever caught my eye at the newsstand. UNTIL I discovered Texture.
I saw it described somewhere as the Netflix of magazines, and it kind of is: for just $9.99 a month, you get unlimited access to basically every magazine that you’d want to read, including back issues. What’s crazy to me is that it’s actually cheaper than buying two glossy magazines at the airport, and it doesn’t add any weight to your bag. You can also access it on up to five devices, so that you always have something to read–even if you don’t have your tablet with you.
I started using it a couple of weekends ago, and was amazed at how large the selection of magazines was. Even though I immediately gravitated toward the women’s mags that I usually flip through in office waiting rooms, I noticed titles like Fast Company and Entrepreneur that I’d also be really interested in reading. My boyfriend was also stoked to find all of the sports magazines that he loves–and he can easily download them all to read on the train while he’s commuting to work. It also features the most popular stories across the app so that it’s super easy to find the article that everyone is talking about.
One of the main things that I really love about reading on my Kindle versus reading in books is the ability to “save” certain passages, and have them all accessible in one place. On Texture, you can save stories that you love and find them all in the app–which is amazing, considering how often I rip a page out of a magazine with a recipe I want to try or cool place I want to research, and then completely lose the page. You can organize them by collection, which means that I actually might start making some of the recipes that make me salivate in Bon Appetit.
I’m especially looking forward to using it on our upcoming trip to France and England: we have two long-haul flights, one long train ride and plenty of evenings-drinking-wine-on-the-terrace that will be perfect to catch up on my magazine reading.
Has anyone else started using Texture? Any favorite magazines that I should make sure to download?
This post was kindly sponsored by Texture, but all opinions are my own.
