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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Zinio for iPad: The Platform Digi-Mags Have Been Waiting For?Monday, April 12, 2010 Digital magazines have had a rough time in the last decade. True veterans of the format may recall that the current  iPad-mania among magazine publishers is in fact the second time the industry has embraced the digital tablet. When Microsoft rolled out its Tablet PC version of the Windows operating system in the early 2000s, digital magazines (most often on the Zinio platform) accompanied many Tablet PCs as they headed to the disappointing few hundred thousand consumers and enterprises that initially bought into the keyboard-less “platform of the future.” Superficially at least, tablet computing seems tailor-made for magazines. It has the right form factor for printed periodicals, and the mode of interaction can mimic hands on the page. Digitized and moderately enhanced versions of magazines should work well here, right? Well, the original Tablet PC languished, and the digital mag format never got the traction many had hoped for back in the day. The arrival of the Apple iPad has revived interest in both facsimile editions of print products on digital platforms as well as some of the more ambitious reengineering of magazine content we have seen from Condé Nast, Bonnier and Rodale. Not surprisingly, one of the originators of the digi-mag format, Zinio, is the first out of the gate with a multi-title iPad digital magazine reader. As part of its Zinio Unity reading platform, the free Zinio for iPad app has already shot to the top of the free app category in the News section of the iTunes store. The app essentially ports the existing digital magazines from its extensive catalog of 2,400 titles to the iPad in a handy, serviceable reader. The user can access more than a dozen samples of full issue content from the likes of Spin, Sporting News Today, Car and Driver and Macworld. The current issue of Zinio's own digital-only women’s magazine VIVmag, is also present in its entirety. Designed as a multi-title magazine rack of your own, the Zinio app meets you with a catalog of the magazines available to your account. The Zinio Unity platform is designed to give the owner of an issue or a subscription universal access to their content across tablet, mobile and set-top box devices. The main page can filter large collections down by year, title and month. Tapping into an issue gives you a straightforward, facsimile-reading experience in most cases. Thumbnails of the pages can pop up in a bottom rail for quicker navigation. Once entering an issue for the first time, Zinio reaches back to its servers to  download the full content. This can take a while. The pages fill the display in portrait mode and sit as two-page spreads in landscape. Tapping the screen zooms into an area, although not with the precision of a zoom tap in an iPhone Web browser or in some of the current comic book readers for iPhone and iPad. In many cases a “Text” button at the bottom of the screen will extract the text from the page for easier reading in a pop-up window. Alas, this feature is not always present, at least not in all of the sample issues we tried. In fact, the Zinio digital magazines bring to the iPad all of the strengths and weaknesses that digi-mags have always had on the PC. When a magazine makes the effort to enhance or contour its content for the digital display, interactivity and connectivity, the results can be impressive. Some of the ads in the sample pages had click-throughs to the sponsor’s Web site, and the reader does this jump within the app and without bumping the reader into the external Safari browser. Car and Driver had a slideshow that was a nice enhancement to an article, and Macworld embedded a video. As on other platforms, Zinio’s own VIVmag remains the best showpiece of what a digitized magazine can be. Like the demo Zinio had been circulating prior to the iPad’s release, this issue has an article on the myths of sex that includes stylish, high-production themed video intros to the feature’s major sections. Tapping the “Vivify” button on an article can activate videos, slideshows or a long vertical scroll of text and multimedia for an article. While clearly VIVmag is designed to demo the technology and inspire others to raise the bar on digital magazines, most of the other titles in the collection are modestly enhanced versions of print. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The portrait mode and high resolution of the iPad screen make reading repurposed print pages infinitely more palatable than the same experience on a laptop or desktop reader. Zinio has also provided a rudimentary online store that lets the user peruse its full catalog of iPad-enabled titles and buy subscriptions or single issues. Unfortunately, we don’t have the purchase process fully integrated with the iTunes store experience, because Zinio ultimately bumps the user into a Web browser to make the purchase with a credit card. Making the buy button more seamless is the next obvious step here. While it is a fully usable and decent magazine reader, the Zinio app does suffer performance problems. Simply scrolling the main catalog of cover thumbnails makes the screen crawl. Even in issues where the full contents have downloaded, the reader has an irritating method of opening a new page in fuzzy low-res and then spending a second or two loading the more palatable higher-resolution page image into place. The audio tracks of videos often keep playing after you have backed out of their pages. And the app crashes. Despite these regrettable growing pains (their bugs are not alone among early iPad app developers), Zinio is offering publishers a way to get into the iPad experience without the cost associated with making your own custom magazine app. Having a library of magazines and archives of old issues packing into such a form factor is indeed a marvel. The short answer to our opening question is—yes, the iPad is the format digital magazines have been waiting for. This device presents and stores the printed page as attractively and conveniently as we have seen yet. The larger question remains whether reading digitized print (even tricked-out multimedia-enhanced versions of it) is what consumers have been waiting for. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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