I was surfing around today waiting for the tennis to start (Federer vs Nadal) with the prospect of watching the football world cup (Italy vs France) this evening, when I stumbled on something I must’ve missed: Digital Magazines

I know it’s something that’s been around for ages, but a company now looks to be properly distributing it called Zinio
They offer a broad range of magazines which you can buy either as back issues or subscribe to
About the same price as buying off the shelf, and it’s pretty convenient if you want a specific issue and don’t want to go down to the shops. Plus since you pay in US Dollars, the exchange rate works to my advantage eg. MacUser UK is £3.95 per issue over here, but only $3.50 from Zinio
An annual subscription works out at £62.46 by direct debit for a real copy
From Zinio it is only $49.95
When you consider that there’s $1.85 to the pound, it works out pretty cheap

On the downside, the digital version comes in Zinio’s own format, (.zno) and has to be viewed using their viewer. The viewer is available for windows & OSX, though isn’t universal binary yet (but has been confirmed as in development)
It uses some form of DRM called contentguard

A reader program is required to access the magazines, which utilize a combination of technology licensed from Adobe and Contentguard

and if you print anything it puts a pale grey watermark on the page

They offer a free sample section, so i took the opportunity to try it out. The freebies are a little lacking though oddly you can get MacWorld Sweden as well as the US version
You can only view one magazine at a time, as the viewer doesn’t seem to support multiple viewing of documents, and while it is based on Acrobat reader, it lacks a lot of the features you’d expect to have such as scrolling
I suspect you wouldn’t get anything to replace the free CD/DVDs you would normally get though they may have a way of having online links to the content.

The downloads magazines in OSX are stored in your users folder/Zinio Library/
The site itself is a little confusing, as there is an international section, but MacUser UK appears in the US section but not the UK, and there are some publications that they sell which don’t appear on the main site as they are acting as agents for the distributors.

Finally, they offer a US textbooks section for students. It’s a little lacking on variety, and since it’s US textbooks they won’t have scientific books that use metric units like Peter Atkin’s Physical Chemistry the defacto standard text for most university chemistry courses.

They say there are plans for adding interactive features into the digital versions of magazines and books to make them more attractive

Overall i kinda like it, but can’t see myself buying through it – and they do need to add some scrollbars to the viewer.