Technology

Zinio Reader 3.0 Review

Zinio is a digital magazine viewer with some serious features. You subscribe the digital magazines just like you would a normal subscription, but you use the Zinio software to download the magazine and view it. You can get many of the mainstream magazines through its service, but the selection is mainly technology, business and automobiles at this point. I subscribe to PC Mag and Sync Mag and got a year subscription for around $10 each! That's an awesome deal compared to the newsstand price.


Some of the great features that Zinio has:
- Hyperlinked table of contents and external websites. Takes you right to the page you want to see.
- Zoom in and out of pages.
- Create sticky notes or highlight a section for later viewing.
- Quickly find what you're looking for using the search feature. (new)
- View thumnails and dates of all of your magazines in a very easy to use Library. (new)
- Print pages.
- View pages side by side like the a regular magazine or view them one at a time.
- For PC and MAC users.


Zinio has just released version 3.0 of their software and it is really impressive. This version includes faster loading and viewing of pages, and I mean really fast! In the older verson it would take almost two or three seconds for the page flip animation to complete and then finallize the rendering of the text, now it takes only a second to flip and load the page, and pages are much clearer overall.

The new Magazine Library gives you a complete list of the magazines that you've received and shows a thumbnail of each issue. I love the new library feature and how it saves me the time of browsing around in folders looking for the magazine I want. Ordering a new subscription, renewing an old one or ordering a back issue are all really easy to do and will be downloaded right away.

Zinio also allows you to use your magazines on more than one computer and print pages off for a hardcopy. Some magazines also include "media rich" content such as video or audio which are built right into the pages.