Zinio means to make a big impression by the iPad’s opening weekend. The company has been selling magazines (single-copy and subscriptions) for 10 years online and on computers, admittedly “before the market’s time” according to CEO Jeanniey Mullen. But fast-forward from the time of Windows XP to the Apple touchstone that boots up on a quarter-million laps this weekend, and you can see the numbers rising for publishers and their readers.
Zinio will offer 2,000 issues for purchase (and another 400 back issues) through its free app, something the company designed as soon as Apple released the iPad’s software development kit. The company knew that a digital reader with full motion and interactive hooks would be a lure to readers who expect more from a publication than just words and static pictures. As of Thursday the company wasn’t sure if it would make the initial April 3 iPad app rollout lineup that Apple controls, but the CEO was certain that Zinio was going to deliver business magazines like Smart Money (from the Wall Street Journal) MacWorld, Kiplinger’s, US News & World Report — even Oprah, Yoga Journal and Esquire. All will enjoy the full-screen experience of the new Apple tablet, she said.
The Zinio catalog has been available for reading on iPhone as well as the Mac and PCs, but the Mac version runs on Adobe’s Air platform. Zinio has been working on removing such technology that doesn’t run on the iPad, substituting HTML5 and XML.
“We started to look for opportunities to optimize our iPhone app for the iPad, and have been feverishly de-Flashing our [magazine] files and our reader,” Mullen said. “We’ve been rebuilding our infrastructure to support the non-Flash environment.”
Small business owners won’t see many focused titles that have been optimized for the iPad’s features this weekend other than MacWorld. But Car and Driver, Dwell, National Geographic, Sporting News Daily, Spin and Zinio’s own Viv magazine are coming online first with video features and slide shows that take a reader beyond a magazine’s traditional graphics and text. It’s going to add a new dimension to showing off a publication’s article during a presentation. Publishers will have the chance to create animated, interactive graphics that might bridge the gap towards a need for skills in Keynote, Apple’s presentation app.
Any magazines you can buy from Zinio.com today and through the iPhone — all but Apple’s restricted adult content titles — can be bought and read on the iPad at launch, Mullen promised. A Zinio version of a magazine enjoys special navigation through a table of contents page. All Zinio titles can tie a reader closely to online content through active Web links. And the most amazing part of the Zinio offering? Apple hasn’t insisted on a way to collect any part of the subscription fees that Zinio’s publishers charge for issues or year-long subs.
As of late Friday before the iPad’s launch, the Zinio app for iPhone was the only download available from Apple’s App Store iPad section. But Mullen was confident that the company, which distributes some of the better-known titles in the magazine world, has permission to act as a newsstand. Zinio is already selling magazines through the iPhone, after all. By moving away from Flash, it’s shedding a light on new display technology. leading publishers away from Flash, admittedly hearing some grumbling, is going to be another force for change in the way graphic content — live and interactive — is presented. Flash is becoming a second option alongside the HTML 5 format that Apple wants to succeed.
“We redesigned the Zinio Web site for a shopping experience on the iPad,” she said. The magazine readers shop for titles outside of iTunes, and Zinio redesigned its readers for all magazines so it drops Flash. A good deal of the debate over the iPad’s chances to be an information hub surrounded the lack of Flash support. Zinio is following two paths: eliminating Flash and providing the publishers’ design teams with a Zinio software kit to create iPad-ready interactive content.
“It will help publishers understand exactly what they need to share with their media buyers, planners, ad agencies and their creative teams so they can start to design and include audio and video for a non-Flash environment.”
Magazine purchases through Zinio are handled via credit card in local currency. The company claims to have 80 percent of the consumer magazine titles available in its newsstand. Magazines are not mentioned in any of Apple’s iBook details, so perhaps Zinio will get the head start on selling some of the best-designed visuals and compelling writing available from traditional publishers. It also looks like those publishers will now have a guide to help them along the path to making research through a magazine an experience closer to TV, a movie or even a video game with interactivity. All this transfomation will take is a publisher’s touch, and the touch of hundreds of thousand of fingers.
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