Today the Zinio app rocketed up to the #1 slot in the News category for free apps. It is ranked ahead of NYTimes, Yahoo!, NPR and USA Today. Pretty cool.
The app allows you to read magazines on your iPhone. The magazine pages are rendered just like they appear in the dead tree version of the magazine, or you can select a text mode where you lose the overall layout of the page, but the text fills the screen and is much easier to read.
If you live outside the United States then physical magazine subscriptions from the U.S. are typically very expensive due to the postage. (You used to be able to select surface mail, which was much cheaper. But then it took three months for the magazine to arrive. I always wondered what kind of surface vessel took 3 months to cross the Atlantic to Europe. I guess those ships have been retired because surface mail is no longer an option.) With a digital subscription from Zino you get the bits immediately and for a much more reasonable price. And you can read the magazines on your iPhone, another mobile device, or on your computer.
It’s a really nice app. Check it out.
February 11th, 2010 at 00:36
Hi Nick
I notice Zino is only available in the USA; I come accross quite a few apps and think ‘oooh I’ll download that’ only to subsequently find they are not available in the UK.
I was wondering what your specific reasons were for not releasing this app worldwide – especially as its free and therefore the headache of Japanese taxation doesn’t apply.
Best
Damien
February 12th, 2010 at 19:43
@Damien: I didn’t realize that the Zinio app was not already available worldwide. I believe the reason is due to content licensing issues. Not all magazine titles can be sold worldwide. So not only does the app itself have to be localized to different languages and locales. But the back-end services have to support each country too. A little bird tells me this will change relatively soon.