Recently Amit had written a post on How to Read Popular Magazines on your Desktop for Free. It is basically a simple, but effective trick of changing your browsers useragent to view the magazines at zinio.com/iphone.
While the trick works fine, you have to be online to read the magazines. I prefer to read such stuff offline and so was wondering if there could be a way to download and read all those magazines offline. I cranked my peanut sized brain and was able to find a simple way to download them.
The pages of magazines that you see are all images and as you flip through the pages, you see the next image. So basically what we want to do is download all the images that make up a magazine. Fortunately, all the images are serially numbered and that makes things easy for us.
Ok, let’s get started.
For this tutorial I assume that you have modified the useragent in Firefox to access the books at Zinio.
Step 1: Open up any book in zinio. Now Right-click on the image, select ‘Copy Image Location‘ and paste this link in some place. As you can see the link leads to an image, the name of which ends in ‘_1′ (assuming you copied the link from the first page). The second page will end as ‘_2′, third as ‘_3′ and so on. Suppose there are 150 pages in total, the links will range from ‘_1′ to ‘_150′. But you don’t have to copy all the 150 links one by one. Since we already have the first link we can easily create the other as shown in step 2.
Step 2: I used Microsoft Excel to create the remaining links. In the link, the part upto the underscore remains static, the number after the underscore increments by 1 and finally the link closes with a ‘.jpg’. So all we need to do is CONCATENATE the three parts to form a link. The screenshot below should be pretty self-explanatory.
The advantage is that, you can reuse this Excel worksheet for all the books that you wish to download from zinio. You just have to change the first part of the link. As for the number of links, it depends on the total number of pages in the magazine. It is better to have a little more than the maximum that you expect. Once the links are generated, just copy those cells, open up Notepad and paste it in Notepad. Save it as a text (.txt) file with whatever name you want. So now we have the links to all the images of the magazine. We just have to download them. If you do not have Microsoft Excel, you could use Zoho Sheet or a Spreadsheet in Google Docs to carry out the above step.
Step 3: For downloading all the images in the text file we created, we would be using a free tool called WinHTTrack. WinHTTrack is basically a website copier (aka offline browser). You can download a copy of WinHTTrack from here. Once you have downloaded, installed and fired up WinHTTrack you are ready to begin the download.
Create a new project.
In the next screen, for the ‘URL List (.txt)’, choose the text file that we created in Step 2. Press Next and then click on Finish.
HTTrack will begin downloading all the images in the links. Once the download completes, you can then view the images, which in fact are actually pages of the magazine.
You could actually combine the images into a pdf or a powerpoint file so that you just have to handle one single file.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
..or you could just use cURL (http://curl.haxx.se/) at the command-line to snag the pictures. The command would be:
“curl http://base-url_1-169.jpg -O”
(I looked through one issue and browsed to the last page to get the number.)
..now if there were an easily-automated way to combine them into a PDF.
June 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I have tried the httrack program and it looks like its working but doesn’t actually download the pages.
In your example you mention .jpg as the extension but this is what comes up
http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/issues/playboy0805v2/page.html#1
I tried adding the page numbers and jpg but same results.
Is there another way
Thanks
June 19th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I tried using httrack but not working well. actually it didn’t really download the pages.
can you help me to solve the problem?
thanks
June 21st, 2008 at 12:10 pm
i cant download the mags u said im abeginner can u help me in downloading the mags if u could send me a detail email to my id on how to download i will be very happy.
please help me out
June 24th, 2008 at 11:15 am
i copied link location frm the homepage after click the image frm homepage mazine open in javascript small images 2*2 size not able to veiw and ur trick is not wrking because of iavascript.
Suresh’s reply: After you click on any of the books on the homepage, you would see a small area on the top left with just a couple of thumbnail images of the book. Click anywhere on that and a full page image of the book will open. This is the actual view of the book that you can either read online, or download it by right-clicking and copying the any one image location and continuing with the method I have described in my post above.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:57 am
@stuart
guess u got one of the step wrong. instead of copying the image location, u seemed to have copied the url in the address bar.. no worries… all u have to do is to right click on the first page-which will be an image-and click on the “copy image location”(if u use firefox) or copy image address(if its safari).. then follow suresh’s plan of creating a url list and download them with winhttrack..
hope it was helpful
peace
July 25th, 2008 at 5:44 am
@Afsal
Thanks very much, u helped me bro
August 20th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Is this method still be usable until now?
September 4th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Download the User Agent Switcher add-on for Firefox, and restart Firefox. In the menu, go to Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> Options -> Options. Add a new user agent, with description “iPhone”, and the following entry in the user agent field:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3
The remaining fields (app version etc.) can stay empty. Now you can click Tools -> User Agent Switcher -> iPhone, and your browser instantly “becomes” an iPhone.
October 13th, 2008 at 8:42 am
wonders: why the hell they charge, when they give it to iphone users free, and if they will ever “fix” this little “flaw”; i don’t see this as being illegal in any strech (could it be?) as we are not doing anything to their copyright/DRM, reverse engineering or anything special.
and since they can’t give it to iphone with out this way. the only way they will end it is to remove iphone support. seems bullet proof to me!