On my flight to Brussels for FOSDEM I had the chance to give Lufthansa’s new eJournal service a try. That service had been announced just two weeks earlier and aims to replace printed board-magazins and journals with PDFs in order to save weight and produce less waste (and save some money, obviously 😉).
About two days before the take-off I received an e-mail including a voucher-link for a download portal where I could pick two items from, I’d say, 20-30 newspapers and again about 20 magazines. The options here were quite diverse including national and international products in various languages. For Austrians “Der Standard” and “Profil” were available among other newspapers, various car magazines and even I think the US-edition of “Wired Magazine”. Sadly, I couldn’t find either any videogaming publications nor “The Guardian”.
Technically, the portal is easy to use, albeit optically a bit boring, but while I tried to download my PDFs it seemed rather slow. The PHP application that was running in the background seemed to be loading the PDFs into memory before serving them to the user. Apart from that and if you know what to do with PDFs it’s a nice service that I will definitely use again in the future instead of picking up dead-tree editions of the same publications 😊
That being said, sadly, you don’t receive another voucher on the return trip. At least that was the case for me and my 4-day period between getting to Brussels and returning home. Perhaps, for longer periods you will receive multiple vouchers or you simply have to use one voucher for each direction 😉
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Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂