Read magazines on your iPhone with Zinio

There’s been a lot of talk about the future of print publishing, magazines in particular, since Apple unveiled the iPad. However, there’s a way to get a taste of that future with Zinio for iPhone, a client that puts free and subscription magazines and book on your Apple handheld right now.

After the Economist went online, my interest in print magazines expired along with my subscription to that fabled publication. Now, there’s a lot of buzz being generated by traditional publishers making the move to digital, and the iPad has been the catalyst.

However, the folks at Zinio have been publishing digital magazines since 2001. Additionally, the company’s been on the iPhone and iPod touch since last year.

See Zinio’s vision for next-generation publishing on the iPad

The Zinio Magazine & Book Reader for iPhone is free and comes with three free titles — iPhone Life, VIVMag, PC Magazine. It delivers faithful renderings (1. Browse view) of traditional publications with a few twists to compensate for the iPhone’s limited screen real estate.

Navigation

Thereupon, most print magazine’s table of contents are just too busy to be usefully viewable on the display of an iPod touch, so Zinio offers a tappable simplified table of contents (2.) that greatly simplifies navigation.

Also, as you might expect, simply zooming in on text in an article laid out in the traditional way often doesn’t yield readable words. Here again, there’s an iPhone specific solution — (3.) Read view pulls out the text and displays it in an easy to read single column view.

Moving around in a magazine or book is simple and just as you’d expect it — swipe to turn pages, double-tap to zoom and pinch to zoom. Read, browse, table of contents and four-up navigation are all accessible via onscreen buttons.

It’s all very smooth and well implemented.

Conclusions

As a stand alone product, the Zinio Magazine & Book Reader for iPhone is a limited solution with the biggest issue simply being the iPhone’s small screen size. It’s useable enough to pass the time for a 10 or 15 minutes here and there, and perhaps that’s all it needs to be.

I have much higher expectations for the iPad version…

What’s your take?

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