During the old days of traveling, one of the things I loved the most about being in an airport is to spend time strolling through the magazine and newspaper stalls, looking at the vast selection of freshly-off-the-press magazines. I always ended up buying one or two, and they kept piling up in my home. I just really love magazines.

In these days, there’s hundreds of specialized magazines, be it on traveling, art, design, architecture, model trains, chickens – you name the topic, and I’m sure there’s a magazine about it. And the cool thing is: Most of them are available online.

Now I agree, an online magazine is not the same as a paper magazine (it starts with the lack of smell of freshly printed paper, but that’s another story). This is why I would never pay the same amount of money for a digital magazine than I would for an original one in paper.

Luckily, there’s a hack to this that lets you read almost any magazine digitally, for free. And it’s 100% legal and available almost anywhere on the planet. Here’s how.

Read digital magazines for free

Nowadays, many hotels and airlines let you read a selection of magazines when you stay at their property or book one of their flights. In some cases, this is restricted to that particular service offering, but there is one way to get all of this free, at any time, without making a purchase at these establishments. There’s an app for this – it is called Pressreader.

Pressreader is a digital magazine and newspaper kiosk app with a huge global selection of the leading publications in almost any country. The app offers a paid subscription service, and you may also buy individual magazines for a fee. And then there’s also a hack to let you read all of them for free.

Besides their for-a-fee business model, Pressreader also partners with thousands of hotels, restaurants, libraries or universities that pay for the subscription and let you as their guest use Pressreader for free. Usually, access to this free service is via the proprietary WiFi of that establishment. But since a few years, Pressreader has also introduced Geolocation as an unlock option for these access points. That means that in order to have free, unlimited access to all of Pressreader’s publications, you simply have to be at or close to the geographical location of their partnering establishment to unlock free downloading.

The app makes it easy for you to find these hotspots: There is an integrated map search function that shows you the nearest hotspot in a specific area. Then, all you have to do is walk to that location (a few hundred feet around it is good enough) until the green icon appears and you will get a message that you have now unlocked “sponsored access”. It also tells you for how long that access is unlocked – depending on the location this could be between a few hours or up to days.

Once unlocked, you don’t need to remain in the hotspot location, and you can go wherever you want (and hopefully have good Wi-Fi) to download whatever your heart desires. If you create a free PressReader account, you can save your magazines across devices. That includes sponsored access privileges. So it is enough to walk with your iPhone to a sponsored location, unlock sponsored access, and then go back to your place and download magazines with your iPad.

PressReader doesn’t allow you to export these magazines in PDF format, but the app is great for reading, and it works across devices. Plus, you may take screenshots of really important content (like recipes).

It doesn’t get any easier than that.