A years subscription to Maxim for $5?! Where do I sign!

Magazine reader app Zinio is running a sale on PC Magazine, Maxim, Car and Driver, Spin and Nylon with annual subscriptions for just $5. This is a limited time offer, with no clear end  date so take advantage of it quickly by downloading the free Zinio app.

I’ll take this opportunity to share my thoughts on Zinio, an app I’m surprised by how much I like. I typically buy a magazine or two per month, usually at the airport, and rarely subscribe to more than one magazine at a time. So I didn’t immediately seek out a magazine app when breaking in my new iPad. However, when the group of us got together to open our iPad’s one of my friends downloaded Zinio and I saw him flipping through the pages of National Geographic on that beautiful iPad screen. I immediately went and dowloaded it.

Zinio is a free app and works very similarly to the iBooks app. It is both your magazine reader and your access to the magazine store. When you download it, it comes preloaded with a full issue of Car and Driver, MacWorld and National Geographic to get you started. From there you can shop for other magazines and purchase either individual issues or annual subscriptions. Once you have a new issue available that you haven’t read, the Zinio app lets you know with a home page notification, just like the Mail app lets you know you have new mail.

Reading magazines through the app is a pleasure. The pictures and graphics pop, and the interface is a fun, refreshing way to read a magazine. I loved how all the websites in the articles and ads were hyperlinks that you could click to take you directly to the site without having to leave the app. You could browse the website through a built in browser and then return to the same page of the magazine with one touch. I will say it took the websites quite a bit longer to load inside the Zinio browser than they would have in Safari, but certainly the time saved by not having to memorize a web address and then navigating to Safari and then back to Zinio makes it worth it. If you prefer to visit the website through Safari then there is an feature allowing you to click right over into Safari, where you have all of the features, like bookmarking and emailing links, available to you. And just like iBooks you have the option of holding the iPad in landscape and seeing two pages at a time, or portrait and seeing one at a time. So far, I like the landscape mode and then using the ability to zoom into pictures and articles.

I’m sure there is quite a bit of variance in how well the magazine publishers are taking advantage of this app. National Geographic had embedded video and enlargable maps you could access straight from the page. Car and Driver had many places where you could click on a photo of a beautiful car and open up a photo gallery of additional pictures complimenting the 2 or 3 already on the page. That’s pretty cool. I’m hoping more magazines take full advantage of what’s possible with a digital magazine over print.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the app and I’m taking advantage of this $5 sale to really see what it’s like to do away with print magazine and only receive the digital edition. So far so good.

What are you waiting for? Go download Zinio. It’s free!