Thanks Scienta!
I’ve been meaning to publicly thank Scienta for the gift of a Flickr Pro account! She has also been telling me about a service which lets you set up a USA mailing address called MyUS.com. They will forward any mail that comes in to your regular address. Handy if you want to subscribe to magazines in the US, etc. Looks kind of expensive to me though. $150 to sign up, please the forwarding fees.
Anybody else using similar services and think they save money?
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:07 am
At US$70 a year for a typical 12 issue subscription of a US magazine , versus a typical US$10 to a USA address, the value quickly adds up. I currently get WIRED, Fast Company, Business 2.0 (who don’t offer an Aussie mailout at all), Technology Review, Strategy & Business, plus I order a lot of stuff from overseas which has crazy shipping charges on it, some of which has free shipping if it’s to a US address. It depends what you buy though, if you don’t buy a lot, it’s probably not worth the money.
April 22nd, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Wow, so there are like… PAPER magazines? From trees? The way they used to make them back in the 20th century before cutting down trees was declared by the international crime commission to be against the law across the planet?
How retro…
April 22nd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
Hey Cam. It’s not just bloody real paper type stuff you can’t buy if you live outside the centre of the ‘flat’ universe (USofA). I couldn’t even buy an electronic copy of GTD because I live in Australia. Yes, a digital copy! Check this post out I wrote:
http://dnwallace.com/blog/2006/02/27/wanted-virtual-address/
I couldn’t buy stuff from Amazon the other day (real books) either. Maybe if I had one, I could have them go to a friend in the US who might send them on for me. (Not that I’d actually do this, of course! ;-)) If by chance I met a friend, say in Second Life, who would do it for me, would that qualify as a virtual, virtual address?
Global market and flat earth my arse!
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:32 pm
yeah Dave, they have some weird rules. One of my favourites is the way you cant book an airfare online in the US unless you have a credit card with a US billing address.
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:35 am
Cam - Yep, I like em for the daily commute, and they’re also a better archive for stuff I really like. That and I know I’ll be able to open them in five years time, not so sure about some of the current digital formats, especially some of the freaky magazine ones. Plus there’s a huge volume of articles that are only in the magazines and not online.
April 23rd, 2007 at 9:23 am
I’m loving http://zinio.com for my tablet (and desktop). It’s a digital magazine reader and subscription service. They have a pretty decent list of primetime magazines and the cost is really low for annual subscriptions. The best bit is you can highlight text and go back later and skip to the pages bookmarked by highlights.
April 23rd, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Hugo - that’s an application I originally had a lot of trouble with (with zero assistance from Zinio support at the time), and I no longer want to purchase anything in a proprietry format. The archive may not work and there is no guarantee that any of these companies are going to be around in 5 years to help you open old files.
April 23rd, 2007 at 2:23 pm
I see your point but i also see my brother’s magazine storage areas. He has a room full of old magazines - so i’m all for a digital format. Books i like a hard copy of though but for the most part, i see magazines as disposable content so the risk of loosing them in 5 years isn’t that big a deal relative to the lower digital subscription cost.
Thnks for the heads up though.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:54 am
I only buy paper magazines I wish to keep, I don’t dispose of them any more than my book collection.
April 24th, 2007 at 9:27 am
I have a substantial magazine addiction so I usually have to dump half a tree in the recycling bin about once or twice a year. Otherwise I’d be at a huge risk of being crushed to death under a toppled pile of ‘archived’ magazines.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:30 am
I’m using a similar mail forwarding service. http://www.boxinus.com. Their membership fees are better and they can store the magazines until they all add up. I have 10 different magazines going to their address and they ship them to me when all 10 are received. Of course it still has a cost but it’s painless. and yeah I still wanna read timeoutny.