Free PDF download

You may have noticed that the free PDFs of this month’s The MagPi and HackSpace magazines aren’t immediately available. We wanted to explain why we made this change, and also share a couple ways you can get access to articles from this month’s magazines if you can’t wait until that free PDF is available.

If you ask anyone in the print publishing industry how the past few decades have been, nearly all of them will share some of the many challenges they have faced. Here at Raspberry Pi, we believe the print experience is an important part of what makes reading wonderful, and we want it to remain part of what we create here. At the same time, we want to do everything we can to share the articles we create with you, including making the magazines available as a free download. To help mitigate the extent to which those two desires are at odds, we are delaying the availability of each magazine’s free PDF. In general, you’ll only need to wait a few weeks before you can download the PDFs.

However, the free PDF download is not the only way you can access the magazine for free. Over the course of the month, we will publish a selection of articles on our blog. Also, did you know that our magazines are available in digital form to some library cardholders? If your library card grants you access to OverDrive’s Libby App, and your library subscribes to OverDrive Magazines, you may be able to read our magazines for free through Libby.

We know this will be a disappointing change for some of you, and we want to hear from you to help us determine whether this change is for the better. For example, we might learn that a one-month delay is more than we need. We might also learn that the free PDF is the only way that people in certain parts of the world can access our magazines. We will be listening, and we’ll adjust this plan as necessary. You can contact The MagPi here and HackSpace here.