Zinio boosts Android reading

The world is going digital. This is not something printed newspapers and magazines are particularly happy about, but it is inevitable. The only hurdle right now is to find the format that works best for most people.

Zinio was always one of the best options for displaying full-colour magazines online, except that it wasn’t widely available. Most users could use it on a desktop but that’s not the most comfortable place to read your favourite magazine. Then it was available for the iPad, but not everyone has an iPad so the market was limited.

Now Zinio has released a fully supported version of its reader for Android devices. Ideally you want to use it on a tablet device, as a smartphone is a little too small to really get best value, but you could always do that if you were pressed for alternatives.

Either way, Zinio’s proper entry into the Android market is a significant one. Zinio’s digital news-stand already lists more than 1,000 publishers and around 100,000 individual magazine issues according to the company. It is an impressive list which includes magazines such as Rolling Stone, National Geographic and a growing collection of local magazines.

Two stage

In early June 2011 Zinio made its first major foray into the Android market when it released a version of its software for Android 3.0. Now in July 2011 the company has added full support for earlier versions of Android including Android 2.2 and 2.3.

Zinio is available from the Android market for free and in initial testing worked exactly as expected.

Unlike many digital reading applications which are custom versions of magazines and newspapers, Zinio is a completely digital version of a printed magazine with all the pages faithfully reproduced. Magazines are paged through in a not dissimilar way to reading a normal printed magazine. The one enhancement for smaller screens, however, is that the reader can toggle between the fully made up version of the page and a stripped down text only version for easier reading.

Reading a magazine on a tablet PC using Zinio is comfortable but on smaller smartphone screens it’s definitely not the easiest operation. The smaller 7-inch tablet PCs are fine for reading one portrait page at a time but a larger screen size would definitely be an advantage. Zinio can be downloaded for free from the Android market.