Moving among publication spreads is as simple as leafing through a paper edition on Zinio's iPad app.
Creating content is still months away from the iPad’s capabilities, but consuming information is ready today. While publishers like Time-Warner want you to purchase single issues of their magazines for the iPad (at about $5 each), Zinio has a free app and a better idea: delivery of a paid full year’s subscription, ready to display on that gorgeous mobile screen.
Zinio’s app provides able organization of your subscriptions, although arranging the magazines seems to be left to alphabetical order. Multiple issues get archived on the device, but you can delete them to save space and just re-download them if you need to read from the past.
The response you see on the iPad while you initially access a magazine can be ultra-subtle at first glance. The app uses Apple’s spinning clock icon while it downloads enough issue to get your reading started. If you noticed the word “download” used regularly up to now, that’s because there’s no other way to enjoy the brilliant pages off the Zinio newsstand. The equivalent of magazine streaming doesn’t exist anywhere yet. And so your initial steps into iPad reading are limited by the size of your WiFi bandwidth.
The full range of Zinio’s newsstand is not yet ready for iPad consumption, because some pubs use Flash in their presentation. Zinio makes its sales and delivery services available to all publishers, but the pubs themselves are in charge of de-Flashing their content. Or more accurately, adding a non-Flash version to their issues. It also bears a mention here that Zinio is selling product without being forced to pay Apple a share of what it collects for its publishers. Apple has a fine walled garden going on in the App Store, but Zinio’s app gives you a gateway into a larger world of purchasing.
The clearest beauty of using the Zinio app comes in zooming into a graphic. National Geographic put together a lively interactive version of its April edition that covers water — and a map of “the third pole” in Asia that might span only the space of two NatGeo paper pages gets the zoom-in treatment on the iPad, so you can enjoy the information at a larger scale than paper could provide. On the downside, we couldn’t get a video feature of the NatGeo sample to run on our iPad, even though the bandwidth was wide open. The fault here might lie with NatGeo, Apple or even the app. This month, many things on the iPad feel like a 1.0 experience.
You can shop for extra subscriptions or single issues through Zino’s iPad app, once you set up an account and provide a credit card number. Many of the publications will sell you back issues, though this kind of one-off reading can get pricey. Subs run from about $10 (a year of SmartMoney) to $46 (52 issues of BusinessWeek) up to 52 issues of The Economist at $126.99. This kind of single-touch shopping will remind you of browsing in Apple’s App Store or the iTunes store: a place where a purchase can be as spontaneous and quick as a meeting requires you to be prepared for. If you love magazines as I do, this app can make the experience addictive.
Indexing and searching a Zinio iPad version of a publication is still in the future for this app. There are many clickable links strewn on pages of magazines such as MacWorld, Popular Science or Smart Money. Most publications offer a complete table of contents with links you can touch to jump to an article. But knowing where to go to find, say, the latest on Health Savings Accounts for your employees, is a matter for a smarter interface than the ease of the iPad. You can do a simple search online at the Zinio Web site, but alas: Flash is required to view and preview pubs through the Zinio Web interface. Searching via the Zinio Web site delivers shopping links to content that you can’t read on the iPad yet, although this is plainly marked — and you can fire up the MacBook to read nearly every magazine in the joint. Flash is lurking, though, in the Web interface.
The multi-touch interface, however, can go places that no browser will travel right now. Turning the iPad to a portrait aspect will show off a single page to fill the screen. Turning the iPad to landscape mode gives you a spread, to enjoy the complete layout — graphics which magazines still do better than any other medium. You can zoom and pull the pages as needed in either aspect. Touch the screen and the spreads appear below in page order, including the ad spreads.
Yes, the Zinio versions of publications include the advertising, and always have, even before the iPad app was released. Ads still bolster most of the publication world, with rare exceptions such as Consumer Reports. You can flip right past them as if they were on paper, although in the iPad version the ads contain touchable links that carry you to an advertiser’s Web site, if you wanted to do more research on say, Web hosting.
It’s easy enough to capture a file that you could transfer into a presentation: simply use the iPad’s built-in screen grabber, by holding down the home button and clicking the shutter with the on-off button. Once you plug the iPad into your Mac, the pictures pop up in iPhoto, where you can export the snapped pages using that application’s tools.
Even better is an e-mail feature that lets a subscriber share an article with a colleague. There doesn’t seem to be any limit to how many articles you could forward to your staff. Clicking on the e-mail message of the text pops up the iPad’s keyboard, so you can annotate with your own message or edit the article down to the salient point you’re passing along.
Overall, I was hooked on using Zinio’s app to consume publications. It’s a genuine test of the readability virtues of the iPad, and a way to read in the dark when you wake early in the morning and want to start your day with some news-gathering. You can download the free Zinio app in the App Store and enjoy a few free pubs to decide if this interface is right for you. I’m glad to have access to information that doesn’t involve storing what I’ve read somewhere around the office, or recycling. Zinio is pushing the publication experience into a new place with the iPad: a mobile library that sacrifices none of the attraction of reading while it extends your ability to share information.
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