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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Zinio Brings Digital Newsstand to iPhone For its initial launch, Zinio has made available in iPhone-friendly versions issues of Automobile, Car and Driver, Chicago, iPhone Life, Marie Claire, Motor Trend, PC Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Redbook, Yoga Journal and its own digital-only VIVmag. Ultimately, Zinio plans to roll out its complete catalog of 2,000 partnered titles. Zinio president and CEO Rich Maggiotto offers a video walk-through of the main features of the new applications below. Zinio is contrasting its platform approach of bringing multiple magazines to the iPhone via a single app against the current trend in launching discrete titles in their own apps. GQ and Esquire recently crafted iPhone apps that brought entire issues of the magazine to the mobile platform. Zinio’s larger plan is to create an access-anywhere platform that lets subscribers to magazines get their titles in formats that are optimized according to the specific device. The Zinio for iPhone app allows users to view the magazine in a format similar to the original print version but then to dip into text-only screens for easier reading of the content. Hyperlinks and multimedia can be embedded into the experience as well. In our limited use of the Zinio iPhone app, the text versioning function was the most impressive. The app lets the user scroll in portrait or landscape mode  across the facsimile pages, and a single icon tap reveals only the text on the page in a much more readable fashion. The current version is less adept when it comes to navigating pages. The zoom function tends to overdo the effect, and images pixelate terribly when the page moves in for a closeup. We also made some attempts to switch to text mode that landed us on blank pages. The email function works well when sending text versions of articles to a friend (or to oneself), but we would also like to see social networks included in the share options. Making a one-size-fits-all mobile app is no mean feat, of course. Many app publishers have been struggling to find a way to craft a universal comic book reader that knows how to zoom into just the right zones of a page layout at just the right magnification. Whether squeezing facsimiles of print magazines onto a mobile phone is at all appealing to consumers is another issue. After an initial burst of press coverage and modest popularity in the iPhone App Store, both GQ and Esquire quickly dropped off the top 50 rankings of most popular apps in their categories. In its early days in the App Store, the Zinio iPhone magazine reader was getting a 2.5 star rating from users. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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