How to download popular magazines from Zinio for free

Posted on 28 May, 2008

May 28, 2008 · 23 comments

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.

download magazines from zinio

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.

download magazines from zinio

Create a new project.

download magazines from zinio

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.

download magazines from zinio

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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{ 21 comments… read them below or add one }

SideWynder May 28, 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.

Reply

Stuart Bowland June 16, 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

Reply

mujib June 19, 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

Reply

San June 21, 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

Reply

sunder June 24, 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.

Reply

Afsal July 6, 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

Reply

stuard July 25, 2008 at 5:44 am

@Afsal

Thanks very much, u helped me bro :)

Reply

Zamm August 20, 2008 at 4:34 pm

Is this method still be usable until now?

Reply

willie September 4, 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.

Reply

zachary October 13, 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!

Reply

snj November 24, 2008 at 8:19 am

Use orbit downloader to generate URLs and batch download the images

Reply

Emilio November 26, 2008 at 10:51 pm

You can use Downthemall too for a batch downloading. It is a plugin for firefox.

Reply

Netsuke December 16, 2008 at 2:57 am

Once you have downloaded all the pages of a magazine you could put them in file, then rar/zip it, change the extension to .cbr/.cbz for easy viewing with a cbr viewer (http://www.renuncln.com/programs/cbviewer/cbviewer.php) since the pages are ordered numerically already.

Reply

warung kopi plus February 21, 2009 at 7:28 am

wah…matur suwun sing kathah ya…, sekarang jadi bisa download majalah Playboy dong….heheheh

thank…!!!

Reply

yogendra singh shekhawat March 22, 2009 at 11:45 pm

Hi friends, After reading this article, I’ve develop a page
that would be helpful for all guys.

Download the file from the following link:

http://www.4shared.com/file/94355741/d57453b6/URL_Cloner.html

With the help of this file you can get the URL list without going
other clumsy way like (.xls) file or any other. Use this file, and get URL list instantly.

plz, post your feedback also whether the file conducive in your work or not.

my e-mail id :

Reply

yogendra singh shekhawat March 22, 2009 at 11:51 pm

Hi friends, After reading this article, I’ve develop a page
that would be helpful for all guys.

Download the file from the following link:

http://www.4shared.com/file/94355741/d57453b6/URL_Cloner.html

With the help of this file you can get the URL list without going
other clumsy way like (.xls) file or any other. Use this file, and get URL list instantly.

plz, post your feedback also whether the file conducive in your work or not.

my e-mail id :

Reply

yogendra singh shekhawat March 23, 2009 at 12:04 am

And friend, It’s very easy to know what is the last value of the character in URL list.
All you need to do is, after downloading of very first page of the magzine,
click on the next image button (that is a black triangle on top, usually used for next button). You see after clicking on it, a gray rectangle appears around the button, it is generally appears in approx. all the programs.

When it appears hold the “Enter or Return” key for some seconds until the number in address bar stop changing, It stop on the last value of the page.

Thus we can know what is the last value for the changing character in the last URL.

thnx to read

Reply

shashidharga August 30, 2009 at 10:03 am

Hi Friends,
The magazines in Zinio website opens in Adobe Flash player in a seperate window and when I Right Click only “Print, Settings, About Adobe Flash Player 10″ displayed. How to copy the link ?
shashi

Reply

Paul April 13, 2010 at 3:47 pm

I have the same exact problem. All Mags are coming up in Adobe Flash Player. I am using Ubuntu Linux 9.10 So the copy link trick does not work. What else is there to do?

Reply

Gerbert September 4, 2009 at 7:53 am

For the iphone very few magazines and they are old,
easier to download the magazines in PDF format from the site http://www.storemags.com
All magazines are free!

Reply

leoloel November 14, 2009 at 3:19 am

http://www.journal-plaza.net
All magazines are free!

Reply

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