Zinio's Mobile Newstand for the iPhone

With the hype surrounding Amazon's Kindle in the last few days I guess it is quite timely for Zinio, a digital publisher and distributor for digital magazines and books to announce that they will feature their favorite magazines on iPhone as well as iPod Touch.

Zinio has been a publishing partner for world’s leading magazine and textbook publishers and offers one of the best digital reading experience in my opinion.

Zinio Mobile Newsstand offers magazines that exactly replicate the print version with razor sharp display along with added interactivity and sharing capabilities.

This is what Rich Maggiotto, CEO had to say about their latest offering:

“The iPhone is an amazing product that’s helping to take compelling content, like magazines, mobile. With its advanced touch screen technology and crisp viewing experience, Apple’s newest devices were natural for the launch of the Zinio Mobile Newsstand. Users will benefit from having their magazines in a high-fidelity, portable format that can be viewed practically anywhere.”

If you have used Zinio, you will know that to access the digital magazines you need to subscribe for them, however with the iPhone version users will be able to access digital editions of top-selling Zinio monthly magazines for free. The folks at Zinio includes publications from a wide range of areas. So with Zinio for the iPhone you do not need to subscribe.

All you need to do visit their site optimized for the iPhone to view a selection of magazine. You can then flick to scroll favorite covers, or tap any issue to start reading on iPhone's stunning 3.5 inch screen.

With the Zinio Mobile Newstand you can also share content you have read with your friends all from your iPhone.

To check out Zinio's Mobile Newstand by pointing your iPhone's Safari browser to www.zinio.com/iphone.

So do you think Zinio Mobile Newsstand will make the iPhone a worthy competitor to Amazon Kindle or for that matter other digital readers like Sony reader etc?

Update (28th Nov): Jonathan Irwin, Sr. Product Manager, was quick to get in touch with me regarding the issue I had reported below. the issue apparently affected only iPod Touch users and as Jonathan has informed me it was due to a problem"in omitting the iPod user agent in the browser redirect." The issue has now been fixed. I just checked it out and I must say it works great, and seems like the content has been converted into html files with images (if you tried using this before and it did not work for you then clear your Safari cache and cookies via Settings > Safari).

Its always great to see Product Managers of companies keeping a tab of user reactions on the blogosphere which has now become a critical outlet for user feedback. If you have any feedback feel free to share them here as you will definitely be heard. Thanks Jonathan, keep up the great work.

Update (24th Nov): When I checked out Zinio Mobile Newstand on the iPod Touch after writing this post, it seemed like the website is still not released as it was giving me the desktop computer version but if it has got you interested like me then watch this space for further updates on it.

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