Category: News
Price: Free app, in-app subscriptions vary
TiP Rating: 4/5
Version: 1.9.5
Languages: English, Bokmål, Norwegian, Catalan, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
Seller: Zinio LLC
Rated: 12+
Requirements: iOS 3.0 or later
Link to the app in iTunes/iTunes Connect

App Store Description: Zinio is the world’s premier high fidelity mobile reading experience, with the best magazines from around the world, in pure digital form. Zinio lets you read and share articles from top titles, buy digital subscriptions or single issues, and manage your library on multiple devices. Read what you like!

Summary: Sick of magazines piling up in the bathroom and cluttering the living room? Do you ever find yourself wishing you could catch up on your celebrity gossip without having to schlep a copy of Star? Zinio to the rescue! This app delivers your magazine subscriptions electronically to your iOS device saving you from having to dust piles of paper. While in-app subscription costs can sometimes be pricey, there’s no denying the convenience of the digital editions.

Review: Zinio is an app which delivers digital editions of magazines. The app runs on iOS devices, and a desktop version is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A wide selection of magazines is available ranging from mainstream publications (Martha Stewart Living and Maxim) to special interest offerings (The Economist and Mother Earth News) to international (Vogue India anyone?). Magazines can be subscribed to through the app, or zinio.com. A limited selection of books is available, though at this time only supported on the desktop version.

With a slick all-black interface, Zinio is intuitive and easy to use. The “Library” houses your magazines, organized by month or title, and issues are downloaded with the touch of a finger. Issues vary in size, but generally are 20 to 40 megabytes each. Deleted issues can be re-downloaded at anytime. The “Shop” section allows you to purchase magazines, either as a single issue or an annual subscription. Zinio has been mum on whether this will be affected by Apple’s recent policy announcement regarding in-app subscriptions. Finally, the “Featured” section brings you free articles from a variety of periodicals.

Navigating through a magazine is easy: you can page through by swiping your finger, use the hyperlinked table of contents to jump to an article, or view the issue as a grid of thumbnails. The magazine can be viewed as a single page while in portrait mode, or as spreads in landscape. Once on a page, you can view a text-only version allowing you to change the font size, and e-mail the page. Although the iOS version does not support printing, the desktop version does. Content in an article or ad can be hyperlinked to external webpages. Thanks to integrated Safari, links open within the app making it easy to jump back to the article.

Unlike ebooks, content in the Zinio format retains the original layout. Font size can’t be changed – so there is no reflowing of text altering the layout – but you can zoom in. When zooming, text stays nice and sharp because it hasn’t been rasterized.

While the app works very well, I am knocking off a star due to content pricing. Magazine subscription costs are often equal to or higher than the print version. Ditto for books. To be fair this is not a reflection of the app, and may be dictated by the publisher. Still, I would like the digital edition to be cheaper than the dead-trees version.

Despite this drawback, I find myself happily embracing the electronic magazine format. My mantra of late has been “bits not stuff,” and Zinio helps fulfill this. I like that my magazines are housed in one place, rather than in separate apps (or rooms…). I especially love the e-mail feature which I use to send an article or recipe to Evernote. And, as one who has not loved the ebook format, I like that Zinio retains the original layout, immensely pleasing my inner graphic design geek.

Overall, Zinio is a well-executed digital magazine format. It’s easy to use, offers a wide variety of titles, and, most importantly, gets clutter out of my living room. As users move away from the printed version, hopefully publishers will lower the cost of digital subscriptions. All in all, this is an app that is right at home on an iOS device.