Formerly launched as Play Magazines in 2012 by Google and later renamed it to Play Newsstand to focus on newspapers. The print replica magazines in Google News, which are the PDF versions of print pages you could view on phones or via desktop were what the Google Play Magazines had ended up as, and now the people who had subscribed are receiving mails from Google about discontinuing this service.
Google Magazines shutdown
Current subscribers of the same have been getting notified since the past month about the immediate discontinuation of this service. While it won’t be offering print layout pages via Google News any longer, Google suggested that readers could still visit a magazine’s website, no further explanation has been provided from their side.
But accessing magazines online is nowhere near to the experience of having a print replica magazine, which was interestingly the at the beginning of the decade, as everything print was scanned and put up in a PDF format and by 2020 many publications primarily have shifted their focus from their print magazines to making digital magazines.
Reading PDFs off the phone was originally sought of as a convenient replacement and even environment-friendly, but now that the digital media is optimized for convenience, the pinch and zoom method of accessing PDFs has become obsolete as there is no other way to present print replica magazines on a digital platform.
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