First of all, thanks again to woodsie for his excellent post on accessing Zinio magazines (designed for iPhone users) through your browser. Before that post I wasn't even aware of Zinio.

However, although the method he posted is great for reading the magazines on-line, it's not so hot for downloading them. You have to click the little right-arrow, right-click on the image, select 'Save As', click the little right-arrow, right-click on the image, select 'Save As'....

For anybody who wants to browse the magazine off-line, or maybe print it out (does your school's IT lab have a decent colour printer? Then start a lucrative career printing out the latest issue of Playboy and selling it in the playground!), this is a long-winded approach. So here's how I do it. This way sounds long-winded, but is really very simple once you've tried it.

First of all you'll have to download Curl. It's a very small program commonly used in the Unix world (I'm a Linux boy at heart) but also available for Windows. You can download it here although you have to scroll all the way down for the Windows version. To make it easier for you, this is the version I used. It should work fine on Windows 2000 and XP.

After downloading it, just extract the zip somewhere. Program Files\Curl is an obvious choice, but it really doesn't matter. Just make a note of where you've put it because you'll need it later.

Now go to the Zinio site (after changing your user agent as described in woodsie's post) and pick which magazine you want. I'll use Penthouse as an example here, but it works on any.

Click on the magazine, click 'cancel' (or give them your email address if you really want to) then click 'OK' to confirm that you're over 18 (only if you've selected an adult mag). You should now have a tiny picture of the front page of your selected magazine, looking something like this:



Now click on the little right-arrow repeatedly until you're at the last page of the magazine, then left-click on that last page. In the case of the Penthouse magazine that's currently on Zinio, the last page is 153.

Now, before you do anything with that page you need to copy this piece of code:
Save it somewhere, because you can reuse it for every magazine you want to download.

Now, go back to Firefox, right-click on the last page of your magazine and select "Copy image location" (wording may be different if you're using a different browser but there should be an equivalent option).

Sticking to the Penthouse example, this would copy hxxp://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/issues/272477683/images_pages//272477683_153.jpg to the clipboard (I changed http to hxxp to stop the link being auto-formatted).

You then need to go to the code, select 'URL' and paste that link over the top of it (if you like you can just leave out 'URL' when you save the code, then subsequently just paste the link at the end. Whichever you prefer).

Then make a small change to the end of it. Where it currently says 272477683_153.jpg (these numbers will obviously be different for different examples) change it to 272477683_[1-153].jpg This simply tells curl to start at image 1 and download every image up until image 153. Which, as we know, is the last page in the magazine.


[EDIT: If you're feeling lazy then you can skip most of this step. Just copy and paste the image location from the first page in the magazine, then change the ending to [1-200].jpg. As long as the magazine is less than 200 pages, this will download them all and just give a 404 error for the extras]


Now that we've got the completed command we need to get Windows to execute it. To do this click 'Start' then click 'Run' Type in 'cmd' and press 'Return' or click 'OK' Now head to wherever you saved Curl using the 'cd' (change directory) command. The older ones among you will no doubt remember the glory days of DOS, and typing cd c:\games\doom, only to find out you didn't have enough extended memory to run it...

Anyway, once you've got to the correct directory (I extracted Curl directly onto C, so I just have to type "cd \curl-7.18.2" and in fact I just type "cd \cur" and then press the 'Tab' key, as Windows will fill in the rest as long as you've typed enough to make the filename unique) you just need to copy any paste the code from Notepad. Ctrl+V and Shift+Ins don't seem to work in the shell, but right-click -> paste works just fine.

Press 'Return' and you should see Curl go to work. It will look a little like this:



The speed will depend on your connection, obviously, but as soon as you can see that it's working you can just leave it to it. Or of course you can start reading the first few pages while it's downloading subsequent ones.

Of course, you've just swapped clicking the right-arrow in Zinio for clicking the right-arrow in your image viewer (unless you start a slideshow, of course), but you know the whole thing's there safe and sound on your hard-drive

If this doesn't work for you or you have any questions then just ask. I've tried to over-explain every step, which is why the explanation sounds more long-winded than it really is, but I may have missed something.