iampowered: Electronic Magazine Reading

This entry was posted in the following categories: Mobility, News

For quite some time now, ebooks and electronic media have been predicted to eventually challenge Zinio traditional printed media. That challenge hasn't quite materialized yet (though the paperless office trend continues), but ebooks and electronic magazines do seem to be gaining in popularity.

Due to the proliferation of handheld PDA's and Tablet PC's, the idea of being able to just carry all your reading material on those devices (that you may already have with you anyway) is actually pretty attractive to a growing number of people. Partly in response to this, a free application named Zinio, has slowly been shaping itself into the standard for reading magazines in electronic format. Since I already have subscription to PC Magazine, I was able to simply download the free Zinio reader and check out PC Mag on my laptop when I was waiting for a recent flight at the airport. Ok, so one of the best things about Zinio is that you can take it with you where ever you go, but there are other advantages as well. As Matt points out in his "quest for completely electronic magazine reading," the ability to capture an article (to OneNote) or print it, can allow you to be much more productive.

I've mentioned some of the advantages that come with being able to take your magazine with you and read it on the go, but there are some disadvantages that come with using the Zinio application. For one thing, it's another application that you're going to have to download, it would be nice if more magazines were available in Adobe's PDF Format. Also, folks with slower (and older) computers may find that Zinio can be a bit slow when you turn the magazine pages or try to zoom in and out.

Comments

Good point about magazines being available in PDF format. I think that it would be more difficult to control subsciptions, however, with PDF format, since it could be easily distributed to others.

Zinio allows you to link your account to specific subscriptions, then apparently stores the content in a proprietary format. I'm not sure if it is encrypted or not with a key that only your account unlocks.

To address the performance issue, perhaps Zinio should implement performance tuning options, e.g. better performance at the expense of lower graphics quality when desired.

It will be interesting to see how the industry progresses.

Posted by: Matt | November 30, 2005 2:13 PM