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Zinio and magazines

W

wombat888

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 10, 2008
541
0
On my Kindle 2, I subscribe to The Economist and The New Yorker. The presentations are pretty basic, and the price is pretty good. I don't remember exact price, but it's definitely cheaper than print.

On the iPad, the Kindle app doesn't let you subscribe to periodicals. So I'm contemplating what to do if I sell/give away the Kindle 2 and use the iPad in its place. Let's please not turn this into an iPad vs Kindle thread, there have been plenty of those.

So my questions are:

- Is Zinio considered the main vehicle for magazine subscriptions, or is it just the first of many? I'd rather use one app for all of my magazines, if possible.
- Is The New Yorker available via Zinio? I can't find it. I do see The Economist, though.

I'm ready to buy the annual Economist subscription on Zinio, just pausing because I don't know much about the market or competitors and I don't want to bet on the wrong horse. I did buy a single copy of The Economist and enjoy the reading experience.
 
Zinio is really the only option right now, besides magazines that are available as apps. In the future, who knows, but I'll be shocked if magazines aren't in the iBook store at some point. I'll definitely welcome some competition. The iPad should be perfect for digital magazines, but right now, zinio is ok, but not great.
 
Just as a warning, there is some love/hate over the zinio app. It renders each page when you view it. This can take (for me on the sample magazines) up to 3 or 4 seconds. For every page. We seem to be divided between people who think it's ridiculous and unacceptable (like me), and those who don't mind at all. May be best to read some reviews of th app and decide how much that will bother you if zinio is a big factor in your decision. Hopefully the app will be optimized more in the future. So far the only thing it enticed me to subscribe to was a dead tree version of Saveur after falling in love with the digital version but being infuriated by load times.
 
Also, no New Yorker on iPad until "summer."
Click to expand...

Blar. Guess I'll call 'em up and beg for my $28/year "professional discount" rate. I've been holding off, but I miss my weekly dose of short fiction.

I do wonder if The New Yorker will have the complete version of the paper edition -- I don't know how it stands now, but there were some complaints years ago about the Kindle version being presented out of order (all the cartoons loaded at the back, etc.).
 
I wish that there was a single App for eBooks and a single App for video streams. We are going to end up with a gazillion apps as the software base expands to meet consumder demand.
 
As I understand it, iPhone OS 4.0 will give us the ability to create folders to hold related apps. I think that will be useful for the different magazine apps, provided any push notifications that hit the individual apps show up on the folder. For example, you get the little 1 on the National Geographic app* that shows you that there's a new issue, and the folder containing all of your magazine apps also shows the little 1, so you know to go into the folder and find the new issue.

(Although I generally agree -- I really would like to have a single app for all magazines.)

* Purely hypothetical -- I have no idea if there is or ever will be a National Geographic app.
 
gwynne said:
Just as a warning, there is some love/hate over the zinio app. It renders each page when you view it. This can take (for me on the sample magazines) up to 3 or 4 seconds. For every page. We seem to be divided between people who think it's ridiculous and unacceptable (like me), and those who don't mind at all. May be best to read some reviews of th app and decide how much that will bother you if zinio is a big factor in your decision. Hopefully the app will be optimized more in the future. So far the only thing it enticed me to subscribe to was a dead tree version of Saveur after falling in love with the digital version but being infuriated by load times.
Click to expand...

I'm one who likes having the full real-world page there, ads and all.

BTW, works on an iPad. Almost unusable on the iPhone due to smaller screen.
 
My biggest disappointment with Zinios is that the subscriptions do not offer much if any price break for delivering electronically. This is most noticable for the British MacFormat magazine that I love. OK, granted, that is an exspensive magazine to buy here in the US because it has to be imported, but if you are delivering via the internet AND you don't get the disc of goodies, why does the price have to be the same as if you subscribe to the print version. In this electronic age, these magazine companies need to get on the electronic bandwagon. it's almost like they see the end is near and are trying to make every last penny that they can.
 
Today's update to zinio really improved the speed of rendering the pages. I might actually subscribe to something now..
 
Skystar said:
Today's update to zinio really improved the speed of rendering the pages. I might actually subscribe to something now..
Click to expand...

Just installed the update and I'll agree, page rendering is definitely fast, took less than a second for my latest copy of Automobile magazine.

Right now, I'd have to say I'm a fan of Zinio. Presently I only subscribe to a few auto mags and all are either $7.50-$8.00 for an annual subscription, about 30-40% less than their paper counterparts.
 
As I understand it, one reason for the separate apps for magazines is that many magazines are looking at presenting a very interactive app that will have the ability in different ways for the reader to experience the magazine.

For example a cooking magazine may have embedded video in it for preparing a dish. A sports magazine may have a short game embedded in it, etc.

Until such things get sorted out what we have now plus Zinio may be the best we see.

I use Zinio and for the most part find it OK.
 
I can live with it (and hope for upgrades)

I find Zinio in general to be pretty good. Then again, I'm in New Zealand and the simple ability to be able to buy a decent range of mags at significantly cheaper prices than I would pay here makes it a good deal (e.g. Esquire here is approx $15NZD per issue and thats for a 3 month old issue - try something like $20+NZD for the air freighted latest issue). So the price is pretty compelling!

The only downside has been general stability issues I've had with the app (store pages coming up blank etc) and the crazy page rendering. To me, the zinio app has incredible potential, and as they fix these little issues then I'll likely be buying more digital magazines.
 
For those who are upset by the 3-4 second delay in the rendering of the pages in Zinio, I just timed this time it takes for the forum pages here to be presented and guess what it comes out to about 3.5 seconds.
 
They released an update to Zinio today, renders the page in approx one second now.
 
Tom G. said:
For those who are upset by the 3-4 second delay in the rendering of the pages in Zinio, I just timed this time it takes for the forum pages here to be presented and guess what it comes out to about 3.5 seconds.
Click to expand...

You're not the first person to make this kind of observation, but it's a subjective thing and what one is used to in loading web pages can be, for some, annoying when loading a scan of one magazine page. Don't know why people need to try to "prove" that other people's preferences are wrong.

Off to check out the update / improvements, hoping for the best. (if I wasn't interested in the app I wouldn't waste time complaining about it.)

Edited to add: it's getting better, but dang it, it still has to render every page and every zoom, even when turning back to a page you've already rendered. Guess I'll try again next update.
 
Hmm, works better in portrait mode than landscape, maybe that's been part of my issue.
 
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