We’ve supposedly been in a digital world for several decades now. At least it seems that long since the predictions of no more paper were first bandied about. In reality of course, we’re not quite there yet but in different areas we do seem to be getting closer. Indeed in some areas like photographic albums we’ve gone almost completely digital. Although when you see lots of internet marketers advertising using their private proxies for Instagram it’s not certain what the driving force is.
Electronic publishing has been one of the major topics this web site like to follow. It’s certainly one of those industries that we will try and keep our eyes on hoping that someone will make the breakthrough that we are all hoping for. We all hate using paper for reading, and most of us dream that one day we can be able to sit down and read a newspaper or the latest magazine without having to deal with the hassle of paper.
Unfortunately, the greatest innovation in the electronic publishing industry is the ink jet printer. That is right, usually when we have a long document to read or edit it just gets printed out. Despite all of the electronic versions of my newspapers and magazines I for one still prefer to read it on paper. While paper is a hassle electronic publishing, or e-books, are still more of a hassle.
A step has been taken in the right direction. Zinio has developed a great way to get magazines on a Tablet PC. Using Adobe Acrobat technology they deliver true to paper versions of various magazines. I am excited to no longer need to get my paper copy of eWeek.
The Zinio reader renders a clean and clear copy of the magazine. You can just leaf through the pages. By clicking on the “Table of Contents” icon you can jump to the magazines Table of Contents. From there you can be able to click on any article and the Zinio reader will turn to that page.
So when I say turn I mean turn. The reader animates the turning of the pages, very high on the coolness factor. This among other little touches like being able to highlight, circle and make digital ink notes provides the feeling of using a paper-based periodical.
Unlike paper based periodicals you can then search for a word anywhere in the document. By clicking on the search icon you can put in a word and it will search on any page. The only drawback is that once the search utility has reached the end of the magazine it stops and does not begin searching at the beginning.
Any URL that shows up in the text of the magazine can be tapped with the stylus or clicked with a mouse and open up a browser window to that URL. While most of the links in the publications were in advertisements it was nice to be able to click and go to sites that were listed in an article. The request occasionally gave me an error and stated that I was offline, since I was working with other pages at the time I know that I was connected.
This reviewer’s biggest disappointment is the time it takes to turn the page and to sharpen the image. When you press the page turn icon the application takes a moment to process the next page. I changed the setting that turned off the page turn animations but this had little on the amount of processing time. It’s a nice feature though and works all over the world too. It’s great to be able to enjoy the UK newspapers easily and even watch UK TV in Spain by using a VPN or proxy of course.
While this is a step forward in electronic publishing and I enjoy reading some of the periodicals on screen. It is a great improvement over past attempts of electronic publishing but I guess I am hoping for a little more.
