What it is: Zinio, in partnership with major publishers of traditional books and magazines, offers subscription-based digital content over the Internet and via its iPhone/iPod Touch native app available free in the iTunes AppStore.
Why it’s cool: Zinio has spent the past 10 years helping people get digital access to the traditional magazine content they already love. Now, at the dawn of Apple’s iPad era, Zinio is poised to offer some of the most compelling content iPad users will see on the device — and just may help save the ailing traditional publishing industry in the bargain.
Many have wondered about Apple’s model for distributing e-reader content — how it will look, what it will cost, and what Apple’s percentage of the revenue take will be — when the iPad makes its market debut in March.
Jeanniey Mullen, Zinio Global Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, told us in a wide-ranging conversation at Macworld earlier this month such concerns make no difference to her, since Zinio’s own model will remain platform agnostic. “Our most important relationships are with publishers and readers,” she said. “Zinio revolutionizes the reading experience and we’re excited about iPad’s potential for making that a great mobile experience” but the company doesn’t sell its current content through the App Store and that won’t change when the iPad comes along.
One of the great things about the content Zinio brings to readers is that it’s not just web versions of magazines people already know and love. It’s an entirely new form of interactive content tailored to extend a publisher’s brand beyond what may be possible with physical books or magazines — to a realm in which the content is enriched with presentation in ways that make it searchable, manipulable (in the case of images) and, perhaps most importantly, more memorable for the reader because of its interactivity.
Currently, Zinio offers 50+ titles for the iPhone/iPod Touch, a roster that grows daily, according to Lisa Hagendorf, Zinio VP of Public Relations, who told us the company “is working diligently to offer access to our entire catalog of thousands of books and magazines — including back issues – which is why we encourage users to install the app even if all Zinio titles are not yet available.” Once the device is released in March, all of those titles will also become immediately available in formats optimized for the iPad. “We enable users to benefit from ‘synchronized entitlement,’ where they simply pay for content once and access it broadly across various Zinio-enabled devices in an optimized format,” Hagendorf explained. “While the devices are great, we know that it is the content that is required to make a device a success.”
After testing out several subscriptions on both the iPhone and the web in the past ten days or so, this reviewer can say Zinio’s digital content has been more readable, engaging and readily accessible — even on iPhone’s smallish screen — than many web-based content sites, even those that offer so-called iPhone-optimized versions.
For anyone truly in love with reading, who might wonder the effects a disappearing “dead tree” publishing industry might have on the reading experience, the emergence of the iPad and the continuing evolution of Zinio’s influence in the digital content realm are both reasons to welcome the onrushing future.
Where to get it: Create a Zinio account on the web and get the free iPhone/iPod Touch app on the iTunes App store. All content (single issue purchases and longer term subscriptions) is purchased separately either over the web or on the iPhone through the phone’s browser.
UPDATE: The original text of this post was edited for accuracy regarding the number of titles Zinio plans to offer in the future.
