How to download popular magazines from Zinio for free

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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